A racing heart 

I find myself idly – or obsessively, depending on how you look at it – flicking through the Fitbit app on my phone. I should be working but I feel distracted. Or I’m the kind of person who’s easily distracted, depending on how you look at it. I notice my resting heart rate has jumped up about 8-9 beats per minute. It seems strange and I’m immediately reminded of a time when my resting heart rate had dropped by about the same some time in the past, and it had been an early red flag for me that my pregnancy was ending.  

It is around the time of the month I would expect my period to start, so I might as well take a pregnancy test.  

It’s positive. 

I’m both shocked and simultaneously not surprised. I stare at the two pink lines for long enough to accept that they are there, I’m not imagining things and they’re not going to suddenly disappear.  

I also instantly enter a state of denial. To be in any other state – joy, excitement, anxiety or fear even – seems a terrible waste of energy. There’s little that I can think or say that hasn’t been thought or said before on the matter, so I enter a state of paralysis. When my husband returns from work I don’t tell him. In all honesty, I just don’t think I have the strength for anyone else’s reaction outside of my own.  

Saying goodbye 

Within days of this, we get news from my husband’s family that his dad has collapsed and been hospitalised. He hasn’t regained consciousness and it’s almost certainly a massive stroke. My husband books the first flight departing the following morning, which means getting up and going to the airport in the early hours. When he gets up I go downstairs and give him a framed picture of his dad and our daughter; heads flung back both laughing wildly. It’s an image captured last time we visited and encapsulates how they are together; silly, over-the-top, bursting with joy at each other’s company. I printed it and framed it with the intention of posting it to my parents-in-law. I ask him to show my father-in-law and to tell him that we love him.   

The outline of a heavy loss is starting to take shape, its edges coming into sharper focus. I kiss him goodbye. Still without telling him I’m pregnant.  

The noise 

Hours later, just after I put my daughter to bed that evening, I return a missed call from my husband. Within less than an hour of leaving his dad’s bedside to take his mum home and get them both a change of clothes, his dad died.  

Being in Northern Ireland, there is an immediate cacophony of activity following the death. The funeral will take place three days later, and this is only because he died on a Friday. Otherwise it would have been sooner. My daughter and I are in the South-East of England and, within 24 hours of the phone call with my husband, we are on our way to Gatwick to sleep in an airport hotel and take the first flight to Belfast on Sunday morning.  

A body that stopped working 

I take to the internet to find out how to talk to a 4 year old about death. The resounding result is to be clear and honest and use words they will understand. I tell her he was very poorly and his body stopped working. I tell her this means we won’t see him again. I tell her people might feel sad and that’s ok. I tell her this doesn’t mean we don’t love him still. Death doesn’t have to be the end of love.  

I find the simplicity of the explanation far more soothing than I expected.  

Silence 

I sit with the silence of what is happening in my body while the air is filled with talk of what will happen with my father-in-law. He will be returned home on Saturday. Family only visitors that evening. Sunday will see the doors open to anyone else who would like to pay their respects. Monday the priest will come to the house, the service will be held at the church, the burial, a tea in the church hall. All welcome. It is my first experience of an Irish send off, an Irish wake. I arrive at the house in the early evening; standing room only. A kitchen buried under the weight of gifts from every visitor; every flat surface piled high with containers filled with home-baked biscuits and cakes. The offerings spilling out into the porch.  

Time slows down yet it feels like we’re racing through the traditions of the end of a life. One thought sits on the periphery of my inner world; when would be the worst time to have a miscarriage? Here during the wake? At the funeral? Just before, or just after? It’s my husband’s birthday 2 days after the funeral. Would that be the worst time?  

These thoughts I carry internally. I never display any panic through this time.  

Still I tell no one. It’s starting to feel like I can’t. Like the words will be forever stuck inside me, buried in the airless tomb of my own history.  

Life 

The day after we return home I tell my husband I’m pregnant. I do it in such a joyless matter-of-fact way littered with disclaimers and caveats, explaining that I understand the timing of this is tricky because in all likelihood I could be compounding the loss of his father with the loss of another baby. I feel guilty and selfish. I feel we need to keep this quiet because I don’t want his family to suffer any more right now.  

He beams and hugs me so gently. I find the optimism layered on top of his grief breath-taking.  

I arrange private scans and screening appointments at the earliest points of feasibility. The first is when I anticipate being 8 weeks. When the sonographer tells me she can see a heartbeat and a baby measuring 8 weeks and 3 days, I exhale for what feels like the first time months.