Written by Grant Shimmin
Content Warning: Child loss
“When did you last feel this baby move?” The question lands innocuously. Weeks to go, a routine
query; no sense of any cause for concern. Her reply ends “just weight changes,” a phrase used
yesterday with family. But even that answer fails to lend the question its intended weight…until he
asks again, more deliberately; then it’s heavy with a red alarm that refuses to relent. He can’t hear
our new son’s heartbeat. It’s the ultrasound of silence—silent screams of shock fly off into orbit as
our world screams to a dead stop.
Matthew will never run in our garden, cuddle us on the couch, or play with the yellow dump truck
that will move his Mum to tears, and bruise my heart anew, in the weeks ahead. All we had
anticipated is over. So much we’d never considered lies ahead. The calls, the sobs, the hugs, the
sympathy, the ashes, the plaque. The not quite getting it—because compared with losing a baby
already in the world, a stillbirth is a “little tragedy.”
“It’s a pity you gave him that name,” says one well-meaner, of the name we’d chosen just for him,
as though we’d wasted it. Like we could have used a placeholder and saved it for a surviving son…
He is Matthew; he has been from the moment we knew. No one else could be.
We won’t see him grow, but we will see him…in the evening of a day that ends with abdominal
surgery. The woman arranged to support us—part of our new circle of sadness—says we must; she
didn’t: “I had nightmares about faceless children coming out of the dark.”
When it’s done they bring him to us, wrapped, peaceful, beautiful…almost perfect. “My poor little
baby, and they don’t even know why you died,” she says, one numbness poised to replace another;
the nurse’s head shaking in sad confirmation.
Leaving the hospital, I meet the man whose question launched this sudden journey of lament. He
has reading material: “They are wise words; so wise.” Alone later, I start. He’s right. But fickle
focus soon surrenders to the tears come to take me into this dark night of loss.
.
Grant Shimmin is a South African-born writer and poet, now living in New Zealand, with a passion for humanity, the natural world and their intersection. He has work published/forthcoming at Roi Faineant Press, Does it Have Pockets?, where he is now a reader, Bull, Remington Review, Querencia Press and elsewhere.