Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month: Life after Frankie

Posted on 12 October, 2020

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month and 15 October marks the International Day of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance.

This month, we’re sharing the stories of women who know these losses all too well, to honour their babies gone too soon.

This is the story of Lyndsay and her Frankie.

It has been one year since the loss of our daughter.

One year since our world was completely shattered and life as we knew it forever altered. There is no silver lining to tragedy, yet finding ways that we have grown, and that our life has changed, has enabled us to move forward and honour the life we lost.

Our Francesca was born full-term, at a healthy 3.7 kilos. Despite a challenging pregnancy in which I underwent an arduous and at times debilitating weekly treatment for rhesus antibodies, I birthed our third baby with hopes and dreams of her completing our world.

My long hard 18-hour fight to bring her into this world epitomized the difficulty of those 40 weeks. At times I thought I could not go on. In the moments after her birth I was filled with incredible gratitude, of love and a rush of pure joy as I held her.

She was beautiful with dark brown hair and hazel eyes which she opened and then cried in my arms. At that moment in time our souls connected in a way I had not felt before. The sacrifice of those 10 months dissipated and I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment; we had made it.

And then, with such cruelty, at 36 hours old, in a haze of confusion and shock we kissed her goodbye as she took her last breath in my arms. As quick as she arrived, she was gone.

As I lay screaming on the floor, time stood still and I begged my grandparents to meet her. In that moment there was no explanation for her inability to thrive. Within hours we left the Canberra hospital, baby bag unopened; confused, in shock and broken on so many levels. Ian was carrying me, and I was carrying a box of Frankie’s belongings.

It would be an excruciating 3-month wait for answers in which the mental anguish was close to unbearable. We would later learn that an unforeseen and unexpected brain aneurysm, in the moments after her birth had taken her from us—the news was agonizing. Ian and I had known the exact moment. We had felt a deep knowing when things went wrong.

To steal the words of another bereaved parent, nothing can prepare you for the pain that reverberates through your body when you suddenly lose a child. It is on the same level, at the opposite end of the spectrum to the intense love you feel in the moments after birthing your baby.

In those days we felt a myriad of emotions, of pure happiness and then unimaginable pain. This pain was then compounded by the heaviness of the bushfires, followed by the isolation of COVID(19). When things felt insurmountable, the universe threw more at us. We had to find a way to keep going.

In our healing we have had to find reason in her existence, to find meaning in this loss. We have had to look for hope in the lessons she taught us. I have learnt a great deal about grief, of pain and the impact of trauma. I now know real courage and tough resilience. I know what it feels like to hit rock bottom; and I know the deep pain of the bereaved as they navigate the newly dismantled lives they lead.

These are my learnings since that day.

Grief is pervasive and lacks synchronicity

I was told very early on that this is a grief like no other. It is a longing, a pain that words will never do justice. It is a grief for a life that should and could have been. The disappointment is beyond any of our comprehension.

I long for a day that all four of us would have a good day, together, but alas grief does not work this way. My good days never align with Ian or our children. It took time, but we found a way to cocoon each other and carry the burden when we were able. We took turns falling into a heap and we tried to be gentle with each other. We didn’t always do well. We tried to move forward together, even at a different pace, on different journeys. And in time, it has become easier.

Grief is pervasive, it seeps into every aspect of your being, and every day I wake and feel the gut-wrenching pain again and again on remembering the path that I am walking.

Love transcends this world

True, real love transcends heaven and earth, soul and body, life and death. For as long as I live on this earth I will be unable to forget the primal screams from our children on the news that Frankie was not coming home. The love they shared for her over the 10 months and 36 hours she was with us cannot be underestimated. I watched their broken hearts in the wailing that followed, at different times and places, but mostly in the silence of the night.

When I find my own time, I would sob on the kitchen floor or the shower and beg the universe to help me through this. In the early days my 6-year-old found me on the floor and took my face in her hands whilst she comforted me “mum, it’s not your fault”. The memory of those primal sobs is something that haunts me to this day. In those moments as we held each other; the pain, the sounds and the feelings were etched into my cell memory, a part of my DNA moving forward.

In the months that followed I felt an urgency to find her, to make sure that she was safe, to make this right. It was an urgency that nothing could abate and even now, 12 months later, I feel it creep up on me. Love doesn’t die when they leave, I think it actually becomes stronger. Similarly, I now know real love here on earth. It is this real love that has moved us forward. I’ve felt it—where you stare into the soul of another human being and ache with desperation to take away their pain. And, when you realise you can’t, you just hold on really, really tight and hope for better days.

This is how we work our way through the worst life-shattering events.

Lyndsay and Frankie.

Community is powerful

In the days following Francesca’s death, we were held together by the glue of those around us. I struggled with the attention and didn’t feel worthy of the kindness. The meals, the flowers, the phone calls, the craft packs. When I could not lift my head, our friends and family, together with complete strangers held us together until we could stand on our own. The kindness of the human spirit was overwhelming.

I found strength from the love we received and felt supported in the care packages that would turn up on my doorstep. In the months following her passing, a select group of special souls continued to show up. They showed up when the flowers no longer arrived and my leave had run out. I can’t imagine it was easy for them. It hurt so much that life took on a new normal, but they were there to hold me up—in a coffee shop, on Mt Taylor or on my couch.

We will never be able to repay those in our life who helped pull us back together, and in many ways, I hope I never have to. The special souls who have walked this path before me, and reached out to hold me know the impact of community—it is powerful, and it is important.

The pain of silence

For bereaved parents life is hard, it takes an unimaginable amount of energy to simply get through the day, so please acknowledge it. Please say something—anything, as the alternate is deafening and unbearably painful. In the weeks and months afterwards, we found a small but significant number of people in our life could not say her name, they could not acknowledge her life or our suffering. There was an elephant in the room and we were made to pretend that it never happened.

Some significant people in our life chose not to tell their children that Francesca was born, for fear of hurting them, which we found incredibly insensitive. Our Francesca lived, she is a member of our family and she was taken from us. When her life is being disregarded, it feels like she is being likened it to the loss of a pot plant—an inconvenience, too uncomfortable to explain.

It is uncomfortable for me to remember staring into those hazel eyes, into each other’s souls, her crying, and feeling her soul leave and then burying her. This is my reality, each and every day. Don’t be afraid to say the wrong thing, there is no right or wrong in what you say, but silence…. Silence feels like a knife rips me open. When you fail to acknowledge her life and our journey the hurt is beyond your understanding. Forgive me if I fail to forgive you for how you have handled this.

Similarly, I was so touched by those who contacted me, approached me in the work café or stopped me at the shops to express their sadness. I felt so heartened that strangers would go to this difficult place with me—for me, for us, even for five minutes. It brings so much comfort to the grieving. Go there. Just say something. And say it regularly. We think about her 23 hours and 54 minutes of every day, and our greatest fear is that she will be forgotten.

We are not immune to suffering

None of us are immune to this kind of suffering, such is the risk we take when we love. People can die. I have learnt that many of us live some kind of Option B. In the months following Frankie’s passing I couldn’t believe the number of people who opened up to me about their own suffering and the trauma that they had faced in their own lives. Lost children, stillborn babies, divorce, mental health, suicide, the list went on. It is easy to face life with an innocent view that things will be easy, that we are immune to such tragedy.

I know that I lived my life in this way, hopeful that it would be without pain.  In the face of tragedy, this innocence dissipates as if it failed to exist. I have realised we all face challenges. These challenges can either destroy us or they can bring us to a new level of living. My innocence was taken that day, and I have to learn to live in a parallel world of joy and fearing loss. It will take a lifetime for me to forgive the universe for the unfairness—losing her at the finish line is something I will grapple with for the rest of my life.

It is taking time, but I am learning to accept and sit with the fear that presents every day around the possibility of more suffering. It is an anxiety that only those who have lived through child loss can appreciate. We are a work in progress.

You have an innate strength

I have realised that we are all stronger and more resilient than we could ever imagine. In those first few weeks, I felt I could never be happy again. I felt like I was suffocating, drowning into a darkness that I never knew existed. Whilst time will never heal the gaping hole that losing a child creates, in some ways, time has been my friend.

I have felt the clouds lift, even slightly, and promise of better days.  We all have a reserve of strength, of defiant resilience, of courage. When we are faced with tragedy, we find this strength, somehow. I remember the pain in my chest as my shattered heart ached with every drop of breast milk reminding my broken body that a part of me was gone. Yet as the weeks passed by, as my milk eased and my tears began to dry up—I saw glimpses of happiness again. I found ways to navigate the throb in my chest, and I poured my energy into indoor plants, making chocolate and other soul-nourishing activities. I found it hard to imagine better days, but they came, and I made it through.

Our life will forever be defined as before and after Frankie now. She is part of our story. She is the very first and very last thought of my every day. A part of me lives elsewhere now, and Ian and I both live on a deeper plane. We can never be the same people we once were. We are so much more. I experience joy in a way I had never felt before because I have a deeper awareness of the fragility of life. I know that it is possible to lose it in the blink of an eye, because that is what I have survived.

I believe Frankie came to remind us all about love, to hold each other with kindness and gratitude. I am grateful she chose us. I have grown immensely on so many levels and I now have a deep respect for the power I have within me. I have self-compassion and self-love in a way I would never have imagined. I know I can survive anything and I promise her that I will work hard to live my life courageously, with gratitude and faith until we meet her at the gate to wherever we go next. It took losing our sweet girl to realise the strength we have within us—she really was our awakening and this was her legacy.

We would like to acknowledge with deep appreciation the many support services that have carried us through the worst year of our lives—the Canberra Hospital NICU, Maternity and FMU teams, Red Nose Canberra, the beautiful GPs at Isabella Plains Medical Centre and our wonderful chiros at Pearce Chiropractic.

In Australia, six babies are stillborn daily and two babies die in a Neonatal ward weekly. It pains me to know so many families walk this truly devastating path. It is important to raise awareness for those on this journey.

If my story gives you the strength to get through another day or the tools to support someone you know on this journey, my suffering has not been in vain.

On the evening of Tuesday 15 October, landmarks around the world will light up in pink and blue, to honour the International Day of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance.

In Canberra, this will include:

• Old Parliament House
• National Carillon
• Royal Australian Mint
• National Archives of Australia
• Canberra Airport (terminal)
• Bowen Place (Lake Burley Griffin)
• Kings Avenue Bridge (overpass)
• Canberra Times Foundation (city)
• Various Light Rail interchanges/stops
• Telstra Tower