Fate takes its toll....

Apologies if you have just stumbled across this blog looking for some decent common sense comment on the world, this post is not common sense; this is emotion the antipathy of common sense. Scroll down the page past this post and I am sure you will find what you are looking for. It’s only 2 posts but I think they make a good point. More, I promise will follow, however I need to write this as a cathartic action and you are more than welcome to read it. It’s just not that cheery.

My daughter is going to die on Saturday. It’s a fact, a certainty I can do nothing about, its going to happen. She is going to die.

She is only little, definitely smaller then normal, the characteristics of her death warrant already there to see where they were not just 3 weeks ago. The dark smudges on the screen claiming to be a cleft palate, the disfigured kidneys and the strawberry shaped head confirming what we really knew all along. She is only 16 weeks old, should have another 24 weeks to go before having to face the world. But she doesn’t get that choice; she was never going to get that choice. Fate in a way that I will never understand had decided that at the moment of conception, the combining of chromosomes not going according to the grand plan, whatever that is.

So what I am supposed to think, how am I supposed to feel? All I feel is an emptiness stunned by the inevitability. I have really known for 2 weeks now, have been able to prepare myself, watch out for my wife and try to work out what she is feeling. But I don’t feel the grief yet, that will come as it will come for my wife. But she has the pain of giving birth to come first. My wife surprises me, she is an artist, a beautiful singer, a pianist – delicate yet tempestuous. I am waiting for her tears, I am waiting to hear her fears, she contains them for the moment but I know they will come and that is what plays on my mind.

It has been suggested that we do not need to act as the executioner, let nature take its course. I can understand why couples might take this option, wary of the ethical dilemma or just wanting to maintain some attachment to the unborn child for as long as possible. But all I see is the continuation of suffering for mother and child, a pressure on my wife that she would find unbearable. It has been having that timetable that has helped us through this process so far, being able to focus knowing that soon we would be a little nearer the truth. Well now the truth has arrived.

My wife and her sister play the piano, Handel, Bach, Mozart. Beautiful duets that occupy the mind drive out the thoughts of what is to come. Since learning of the pregnancy I had secretly hoped for a daughter, another musician inheriting my wife’s skills and beauty. I found out it was a girl as I read the results of the chromosome abnormalities - lifting the heart and spinning it around before being pierced by the bullet. But I know its not the end, this happens to many, many couples every year and the next year they become proud parents and that is what I have to keep hold of. Not the end, but another beginning.