We are not all the same, but when I was newly bereaved I needed stories of hope from other parents who'd lost children and who were further along the road. I’ve been without Juliette for twenty-two years now, and I’d like to write a bit about what's changed, and the way my ongoing love for my beautiful girl infuses how I live now.
Juliette is, without exception, the bravest person I’ve ever known. I picture her at the age of four saying ‘no’ to the numbing cream, and not flinching when the catheter needle pierced her skin. She kept her wicked sense of humour throughout months of chemotherapy, and adored life, asking for ‘something exciting’ to happen on every day she was well. I’m so proud of the amazing little human I produced, who was here for only five years. Juliette is my talisman when my own courage fails, and my reminder to look for everyday joys.
I’m in New Zealand at the moment, with my husband of two and a half years. Today, driving along the coast we parked on impulse before sliding down a scree bank, just because we’d spotted a deserted little cove from the road and decided we had to swim. In many ways our plan wasn’t ideal; aside from the scramble to get to the sea, we found uneven rocks under our bare feet, and about twenty metres of thick seaweed to wade through before it was deep enough for us to submerge. Oh, and I’d left my swimming things at home, so had to make do with underwear and a t-shirt. The old me would have used any of the above to get out of such an ordeal, but the me that holds the memory of an extraordinary five-year-old in her mind every day, thought, ‘Why the hell not? She would have done it.' The sun was hot, and we plunged into cold water under ancient, gnarled Pohutukawa trees. That moment is already a golden memory.
A second thing happened on our short road trip that made me think of Juliette. We climbed the crater of a dormant volcano with a lovely Māori guide, who told us about the sacred burial site we could see some distance away. She invited the group to choose a stone to leave in memory of a person we’d lost, to add to the heap already made by those who’d passed by before us. These unexpected moments always make me tear up, and I walked around trying to find a beautiful stone amongst the rough black, white and orange volcanic scoria, but each one I picked up didn’t feel good enough. Then I imagined how Juliette would laugh at my seriousness - she was irreverent of such things - so I picked up the first white stone I found, which I added to the pile. Juliette’s glee squashed my gloom, and not for the first time.
When I kissed Juliette goodbye twenty-two years ago, I knew I had no choice but to keep functioning for my other children, but I would have been disgusted by the suggestion that I could be happy again. What I’ve learned, as I wrote in an earlier blog post, is that happiness is not like the innocent happiness of before. It has a different quality, and it’s threaded through with my love for an incredible little girl who can no longer be physically beside me. I don’t like the expression that time heals. I will never be healed from my daughter’s death, and I don’t expect that the pain of her not being here will ever go. But I’ve grown around my sorrow, inspired by how my amazing daughter lived her too brief life.
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