The Elephant Cloud

Friday 28th Aug Share

BABY MINE- James's Story

Friday 28th Aug

That morning, I didn't feel too well.

Everyone was asking how I was and how my baby boy was. It was during those conversations that I suddenly realised something.

I hadn't felt him move.

I hadn't even noticed until that moment.

A horrible feeling started to creep in.

I knew something wasn't right.

By about 8pm, I told Andy that we needed to go to the hospital.

I knew something wasn't right, and I couldn't sit at home waiting any longer.

At the hospital, I was strapped to the machine that monitors the baby's heartbeat.

I waited for the sound I was desperately hoping to hear.

But there was nothing.

The silence was deafening.

They took me for a scan, and although part of me was still desperately hoping we were wrong, I think I already knew.

Then came the words that would change our lives forever.

"I'm sorry, there is no heartbeat."

Our baby boy was gone.

After the miscarriage the year before, I'd been terrified throughout this pregnancy. We'd finally allowed ourselves to believe that this time we were going to bring our baby home.

We'd moved house for him.

We'd bought things for him.

We'd found out he was a boy.

We'd imagined meeting him.

We'd planned our future around him.

And suddenly, he was gone.

There are some moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after.

This was one of them.

I turned to Andy and apologised.

I told him I was sorry.

I felt like I should have been able to keep our baby safe. I was his mum. He was supposed to be safe inside me, and somehow I felt like I'd failed him.

But I hadn't.

There was nothing I could have done.

I just didn't know that yet.

I was 37 weeks pregnant. My baby boy was so close to being born, and yet there would be no bringing him home.

No first cry.

No watching him grow.

No life with the little boy we'd already loved so much.

He was just gone.

We were taken to the Snowdrop Suite, away from the main maternity ward. It was a place specifically for families who had lost a baby.

It felt surreal.

We had walked into the hospital expecting to hear our baby's heartbeat.

Now we were sitting in a room designed for people like us.

We were given a big pack of information from Sands, the baby loss charity, about baby loss and the support available to us.

At that time, we didn't want to read any of it. We weren't ready.

I didn't want to think about grief or what came next.

I just wanted my baby.

We were told I would have to give birth to him.

That was something I couldn't properly comprehend.

I was going to have to go through labour knowing that my baby was already dead.

When we were alone.

We had time.

We cried.

We held each other.

We both knew that neither of us could fix what had happened.

But we could be there for each other.

We had both lost our baby boy.

The labour itself became a blur.

I was in intense pain and was offered every type of pain relief available, but I refused an epidural.

As difficult as it was, I wanted to experience the labour.

There was something inside me that needed to go through it.

I knew I was going to meet my baby boy, and I wanted to experience every moment I could with him.

On 23rd March 2016, James came into the world.

Silently.

We had asked the midwife to take him away immediately because we were frightened. We didn't know what he would look like, and we weren't ready to see him straight away.

Eventually, the midwife returned with photographs and his tiny hand and footprints.

We looked at the photographs together.

We sobbed.

And there he was.

Our beautiful little boy.

James.

He looked like a sleeping baby.

That was what we'd been so scared of — not knowing what he would look like, or whether we'd be able to cope with seeing him.

But he was beautiful.

He was our baby boy.

When we were ready, we met him properly.

I'll never forget the look on Andy's face when he first met his son.

I actually caught that moment on camera.

He was completely heartbroken, but there was something beautiful about the photograph.

It was the moment a dad met his little boy for the first time.

It just wasn't the way either of us had ever imagined it.

We cuddled James so gently.

We were terrified of hurting him, even though we knew he was already gone.

But every instinct in us was still telling us to protect him.

He was our baby.

We just wanted to hold our son.

We wanted to make memories with him, even though they were memories we never should have had to make.

We changed him into a Dumbo baby-grow.

It was the only one that fitted him properly, but it was also the first set of clothes we'd ever bought for him.

From that moment, Dumbo became his thing.

It became our little connection to him.

Something that reminded us of our baby boy.

Eventually, it was time to leave him.

James was taken to the chapel of rest, and we went home without our son.

We had gone into hospital expecting to bring a baby home.

Instead, we returned to an empty house and an empty nursery.

Eventually, we had to say goodbye.

We dressed him in his pyjamas and read him his Dumbo book.

It felt like such a normal thing to do with your baby.

We cuddled him.

We read to him.

We spent our final moments together.

Then we said goodnight.

And we left him for the last time.

Goodbye, James

James's funeral was one of the hardest days of our lives.

His tiny white coffin was the smallest coffin I had ever seen.

Before we got him out of the car, I asked the undertaker if he had been a good boy.

They told me he had.

I was his mum.

Of course I wanted to know that my baby had been looked after.

That tiny conversation meant more to me than they probably realised.

We carried James into the service to Baby Mine from Dumbo.

It was the perfect choice for him.

Dumbo had become such a huge part of James's story, and hearing Baby Mine as we carried our little boy into his funeral felt incredibly personal.

His service was heartbreaking, but beautiful.

Afterwards, everyone else left.

For one final moment, it was just me, Andy and our son.

No crowds.

No talking.

No distractions.

Just us.

We said our final goodbye.

Afterwards, our families gathered together and we released balloons for James.

As we watched the balloons float away, something happened that I still can't really explain.

One of the clouds had formed the shape of an elephant.

An elephant.

After everything we'd been through, after Dumbo had become such a huge part of James's story, there was suddenly an elephant in the sky above us.

Maybe it was just a cloud.

Maybe it was coincidence.

But in that moment, it felt like something more.

I took a picture because I never wanted to forget it.

Answers

We waited months for James's autopsy results. I needed to know if this was my fault.

Eventually, we got the answers we were looking for.

It wasn't my fault.

James had died because of slow, progressive pre-eclampsia.

Normally, pre-eclampsia affects the mother first, but in this rare case, I had shown no signs of it.

Instead, it had only affected the placenta.

The placenta had stopped working properly, meaning James wasn't getting what he needed.

There was nothing I could have done.

After months of wondering whether I'd somehow failed my baby boy, I finally knew the truth.

I hadn't failed him.

It wasn't my fault.

I had carried him.

I had loved him.

I had done everything I could.

And finally, I knew what had happened to my precious boy.

It didn't bring James back.

It didn't make the grief disappear.

But it gave me something I'd desperately needed for months.

The knowledge that I hadn't failed my son.

I had been his mum.

And I always would be.

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