But when I did see her again it was too late. Despite the lumbar puncture, and the antibiotics they’d pumped into her, within a few hours she’d succumbed to meningococcal septicaemia, a swift and merciless killer in such a tiny child. A few nasty germs in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘WASH YOUR HANDS’ said the posters on the walls of the hospital, in the corridors and in the bathroom. And they made me feel it was my fault, that I was a bad mother, that I was dirty and careless and I should have taken better care of my baby girl. But no matter how much I washed my hands, scrubbing them until the skin was cracked and raw, I could never bring her back. I couldn’t wash away the guilt.
Tom and I rushed into the hospital that night as a couple of desperately worried parents. A day later, we walked out again so slowly – the longest and hardest walk I’ve ever taken – devastated and broken, without our baby girl. My heart felt as empty as my arms without her. And then, at the very time we most needed the comfort of one another, Tom and I were separated by the unbridgeable distance of our grief, each drawing into our own worlds as we struggled to go on with our lives without her.
Making the quilt has been my way of trying to turn her clothes into something else, I tell Josie. Because how could I ever throw them out? How could I give them away and imagine another child wearing them? And yet no one will ever wear them again and I can’t keep carrying the neatly folded piles of baby clothes with me from one home to another for the rest of my life.
Stitching the Tree of Life pattern has come to symbolise hope for me. Making the quilt has got me through some of my darkest moments here. It’s also been my way of trying to reconcile myself to some sense of an ending – my way of picking up the pieces of my shattered life and putting them together again. I know life never can be the same after losing Grace, but sewing this quilt has been a way of showing that perhaps I can transform the pain and the grief into something else, something new and beautiful, from the tattered scraps that remain.
I’d promised myself that once I’d finished sewing the quilt, I’d be ready to face the truth. And in a way I was right, because here I am saying these things to the one person who I think just might be able to understand.
I don’t cry as I’m telling Josie all this. It’s a relief to be able to speak my truth to someone who understands that a heart can be as empty as the Sahara Desert and still somehow go on beating. I only break down afterwards, when she draws me into her arms and lets me sob into the folds of her shawl, rocking me gently, just as I used to rock Grace to get her off to sleep, singing her a lullaby from long ago.
Zoe – 2010
Tom agrees to drive us to the beach. We pick up Josie and I insist she sits in the front beside him. At first, they make polite conversation about the weather and she asks him a few questions about his job at the port. But I can tell there’s an instant rapport between them. I’ve told him her story and he finds it fascinating too. As we continue through the dirty streets, he asks her about the city in the war years and she points out the fine detailing of the dignified old buildings, still just discernible beneath the modern veneer of tackiness that disguises them these days. I hope there’ll be many more opportunities for him to talk to her. I can see how much he respects her, and I know her gentle wisdom would help him as it has helped me.
I sit in the back, only half listening to them, lost in my own thoughts. As we drive past the entrance to the harbour, I picture how it must have been on the day the Americans attacked. I see the flames and hear the ear-splitting explosions as the ships were hit and the Esperanza sank, taking its cargo of refugees with it. And in my mind’s eye I see the slight figure of a girl thrown from the deck into a sea of burning oil and a boy leaping from the quayside, without hesitation, to save her.
The devastation of the harbour and the devastation of my marriage seem to meld into one. And yet Josie has shown me that, even when the tangled web of life and love and loss and grief becomes too much to bear, it’s still possible to keep on living.
On one of our walks in the Parc Murdoch, where we like to go sometimes to stroll beneath the avenues of palm trees and sit on the bench between the pines, I asked Josie how she’s been able to move on, having suffered so much and lost so much. She fixed me with her sea-green gaze and thought for a while before she said, ‘You know, I used to think of myself as a tiny drop in the ocean of life. But I’ve come to see that I am not a drop in the ocean: I’m an entire ocean in one tiny drop. There is no answer to your question, Zoe. Some things are impossible to move on from – instead, you have to find a way to live with them. The secret is to open your heart, even as it breaks. Because that’s when you discover that you have the capacity to contain it all – the pain and the love, the dark and the light. Just like the ocean. Finding the strength to do so can be quite a challenge, and it takes time. But, in the end, it’s facing up to the truth that will set you free.’