Lockdown in Melbourne, Infant loss and Grief

I’m trying to catch up on my taxes but it’s been really difficult.

*content warning, I discuss death, grief, infant death and parental loss. If hearing about these topics is difficult for you I have included some contact numbers below.*

A lot of the time I have trouble sitting at my desk because the things I have to do here require me to disassociate from my pain for several hours to gain focus. My pain is deeply embedded in my chest, it’s hot and lava-like in its viscosity and so to quell it’s eruptions takes a lot of effort. To let the eruptions flow also takes effort and energy. It is draining work. When it reaches the surface it leaves me numb in anger and sheer disbelief. Startled awake in the middle of the night with a quickening heart. If I follow it, it may then take the form of silent sobbing, tears pooling and flowing and eventually the sobs grow in volume as vocalisations emerge. Little whimpering sounds with the occasional howl and moan. All I can do is cower in the fetal position as my face becomes wet and distorts into a permanent grimace until there are no more tears, just dehydration, maybe a headache. That is my pain. My newly adopted cat may wander over to me and try to lick my face. Or he will just sit beside me waiting for the commotion to settle down so he can return to sleeping on my legs. I am not deceived, it is not empathy I am receiving from my cat and it is of little comfort other than to distract me for a moment. Cats can be sweet and cute but they are also just, cats. They respond to pats and food and the care we give them. It’s in their favour to cuddle up to us sometimes. I know this. They are no replacement for my baby boy.

My previous cat, Terrence, died almost a year ago during my first trimester with Percy. At the time of Terrence’s passing I was distraught. Rife with despair. I remember falling to my knees melodramatically and shouting, “why!” and that was my earnest response. It hurt. My mum had passed away from pancreatic cancer on Valentines Day of 2018 and I had chosen Terrence to adopt a couple of months afterwards. A cat to pour my love into. He became a bridge from one death to another, although I did not know that at the time. He was so cuddly and chill and was always available for sitting upon your chest or beside you when you had to work. He was FIV+ and I wonder if that contributed to his lack of playfulness. This new cat, Ashi (it means ‘legs’ in Japanese language) is more selective with his affection. We adopted him a month ago. He has Terrence-like moments of sprawling out on our chests but they are infrequent and he requires more play time and was generally more aloof at other times. Despite the difference in his nature, he is a sweet cat and the house is better with him than without. It wasn’t without triggers to have him around at first, the affectionate language I use is not dissimilar to how I sung briefly to Percy when he was with us. And ouch it hurts.

My pain is emotional but it runs deep enough that it is playing havoc with my nervous system. Though my situation is somewhat uncommon — that being postpartum with no baby to feed due to neonatal death and yet trying to conceive again, my periods have been missing for several months and I find it deeply upsetting. It’s highly probable that this is a normal response to the events of birth, death, a pandemic and living through six lockdowns in the most locked down city of the world, Melbourne, Australia. Western medical experts and Chinese herbalists alike tell me it’s all a ‘normal response’ but even so it only serves to further drain any hope I have for starting anew and trying for a sibling for my first born son, Percy. Trying to live the life I had wanted to live, well that is not really possible anymore. But how many times over will I have to recalibrate and how can I find purpose in what I have left when I had already worked so hard to shift my focus and interest in music and work in preparation for caring for my baby? With no monthly bleeding I feel robbed of the choice to try again to help in my healing. I feel dormant, dry like cracked mud.

Like many, I have had to shift ‘career’ directions since March 2020 when the pandemic first hit our shores. I had planned to tour consistently within America and had received a three year working visa to engage in more music work. My partner was planning to leave his job to join me and we would live a life on the road for a while, try for a baby and let our passions guide us. For the first time in our lives we were going to leave secure work, by choice. It was not to be. We handled the first phase of the pandemic like many, by baking bread; at-home workouts, bingeing tv and playing video games, meddling with healthy preconception diets and hobbies. We even had the opportunity to go surfing for one blissful week in winter on the Victorian coast with some friends in between the 2020 lockdowns. We had fun and thought of things being okay sometime in the not too distant future. When we returned from that holiday things became worse. We struggled with the second lockdown in our urban apartment and my partner’s father had a sudden heart attack that took him straight to ICU. Restrictions increased and we weren’t allowed to go and see him. Seven weeks passed and he was moved to a different hospital for palliative care — we think due to covid ICU bed quotas, though we can’t be sure — and he died shortly after. My partner was incredibly angry and rightly so but where could he direct this anger? He had been denied the right to visit his father at his greatest time of need and when they did finally let him it was too late.

This tragedy shook us. We had been trying to conceive for most of 2020 and we were suddenly so lost. We had moved into his father’s house to start the long process of dealing with a deceased estate and all that it entails. I recalled my acute grief in the wake of losing my Mum and tried to apply that experience to this one but it was incomparable. My Mum had passed away in our home and she had had a battle with pancreatic cancer spanning 19 months. She was one of the most healthy people I knew and also; caring, generous, smart and well-loved. Losing her before her time (she was just shy of 65) was a tragedy for many but her unexpected illness showed me that life did not discriminate. Cancer can come for anyone. During that time we were able to have conversations and I was able to provide her with care. My grandfather also died from the same disease in 2012 and I had visited him in Sarawak during his last months so I had seen a body suffering from the illness before I had to see my Mum go through that. I had the opportunity to visit her interstate for long stints and tend to her needs, together with other members of my family. It was traumatic as I think watching your mother die in your arms will always be but there were choices along the way that made that harrowing experience of watching cancer take a life somewhat more bearable. My partner didn’t have that.

To understand someone else’s grief is not easy and maybe not even possible. But in these months since Percy passed away I have reflected a lot upon how different the experiences were between my loss of my Mum and the loss of my partner’s father. I was also in deep shock and still am. It’s only been 4 months and I am still in disbelief that my son has died. That I was pregnant for 37 weeks and 5 days, birthed a healthy baby boy with no need for intervention only to have him die on his 3rd day. I can’t believe that happened. Amongst this my cat died and a former bandmate also passed away. How can these deaths happen in such close succession? And how cruel that this would happen during lockdown. Though there was respite in the beginning of 2021 and we were able to enjoy alpine hiking adventures in my second trimester and starting new masters studies in response to the pandemic-scape it didn’t last long. I’d already felt somewhat pitied by others interstate due to simply being in Melbourne during the lockdowns, but now I feel even more alienated due to this huge gaping loss. My bandmates were due to have their babies around a similar time as were many of the friends I’d been focusing on for the past year and now, they’ve become secondary losses. Tricky relationships to navigate without fear and anxiety and cold reminders of what I am missing out on as a parent of Percy, and for Percy himself. My friends, despite their best intentions and efforts, can find it hard to connect with me because they don’t have comparable experiences to this magnitude of grief. It is frightening to think of these things. They reach out more sporadically these days. But even when they do reach out, what is there to say? This kind of grief places you on foreign ground where the best allies in terms of using language or words to express anything deemed helpful are others’ who have walked this territory. Though occasionally people can break-through and we can connect over something or by the offering an ear and validating what I choose to express. At least now the friends in NSW have a bit more of an idea of what it is like to endure lockdowns. But even me saying that, ‘at least they know about lockdowns’? I mean, what kind of bleak silver lining is that? The kind of loss we have experienced in losing Percy has no silver lining, no meaning, no sense. That his death may have also been avoidable was due to negligence in our care is a horrible horrible fact to hold. That I am contemplating how long we need to hold on to the baby things we had purchased is also by and large — depressing work. To keep it shows that I have hope for another child soon, but when you experience cumulative losses in such a short amount it is really hard to have hope or to let yourself be hopeful for fear of further tragedy and disappointment. People will say, “you don’t have to decide that yet” and so you don’t but then months pass and nothing has changed in your thinking. You’re still in lockdown and have had no other large experiences other than the traumatic death of your baby months ago to define who you are in that moment. And I think that’s one of the overwhelming emotions I feel currently. Fear and anxiety.

For people to not take the pandemic seriously suggests to me, ‘do they not know loss?’. With so much uncertainty in the pandemic times I have found it hard to separate grief from lockdown fatigue. Because throughout all the lockdowns I have been grieving. And there is something unique about loss in the maternal line, my mother and my child. Gosh it hurts. There is so little I can control now that dealing with my ‘stuff’ is all I really can manage. I have watched all the tv and films I can, I still can tolerate some podcasts and audiobooks I have to search really hard to find voices I can relate to and whom I feel like hearing from. That’s what child loss does to you. It makes you extremely sensitive to any flippancy attributed to life, parenting or loss uttered by storytellers. Watching something light can be utterly alienating but watching something too dark can be too close to home as well. It’s hard to know what you need and what might work, even if just for one episode. I cleaned and reorganised our entire book collection suffering from insomnia one night and realised I was doing it so I could make a nice home for Percy’s urn. In the course of that busy work I had momentarily forgotten why I had started such a huge task at 1am, but upon completion it was there, the empty space a mirror to my empty arms. I made a little shrine for my Mum in the process and felt some refuge in my grief for my Mum. Wow, it had taken me three years to finally make a shrine for my Mum. I felt relieved. How strange to seek refuge from one grief in the grief of another.

And then there are my taxes. I was once one of those people who other artists’ or creatives’ would go to for advice on how to make tax management less daunting. But since my mother passed away, doing my taxes — which were trickier due to multiple income streams and having a part-time job alongside a music profession — had become stalled in grief. They served as a reminder of my mum’s sickness, of the career momentum I’d built up and lost several times over and they were incredibly tedious. But in order to get any financial support from the government I needed to be on top of them. Which is where grief can lead you — to unemployment, isolation (sometimes self imposed, sometimes not) and a mess of finances. After a parent dies, dealing with the family house is often that insurmountable looming mountain that needs to be overcome in order to allow the griever to actually grieve. You inherit all this admin so, naturally, as I watch my partner battle through task after task in relation to his Dad’s estate I am spurred on to get on top of my shit. I wish to devote my time to culling accumulated crap from storage units to the dusty corners of my studio shelves. I don’t want any excess baggage dragging me down in my new life. This is about the only thing I can summon any motivation for in these lockdown-post-Percy-passing-grief-days but even this is too much for me. The me that was once resourceful, resilient and typically optimistic is the me of the past. All I want is to have some new experiences far away from this apartment, our trauma and the life we had thought we’d be living with Percy. But that’s not been possible and it has been so, so rough.

Child loss has changed me and darkened my already sober view of the world. I am receiving help from a range of professionals to support me through this period and I’ve stopped working until my parental/bereavement leave runs out. But I am ultimately struggling to figure out who I am now. Though no doubt I will have more experiences available to help me integrate my grief and pain as things open up in the world, I still wish every day that my baby hadn’t died. I wish for many things. I used to care about social issues, social justice and other people’s problems including those of my friends and family but now I have no room. No choice but to live selfishly.

I wanted to put this down somewhere so that, if — somehow — in the post-lockdown world you meet someone anew, or again, and you think they are aloof, distant, cold or rude or just ‘not themselves’ know that, this is could be someone who has lost and awful lot in a short amount of time. They could be grieving. They could be me, and their story could be the stuff of your nightmares. I have this incredible sadness within which I still laugh and smile, but it’s a part of me and I carry it each day. Some days it’s heavier than others and on those days I may be an awkward presence to bear. I don’t know how but somehow people do survive tragedies and they go on and live their lives manage to leave the house to buy groceries.

So I am writing here because I thought I might try to share some more writing as an experiment to see if it is helpful. I thought I could write about some of the films I have connected with and some of the activities I have been able to do that have been positive distractions. The filmmaker Lee Chang Dong and the writer Yiyun Li are storytellers who seem to capture the grief experienced in the loss of a child in a way I can relate to. So I might start there. If you’ve read this, thanks for doing so. I don’t know when I will post again but hopefully it will be soon.

If you or anyone you know needs help:

• Lifeline on 13 11 14
• Red Nose Grief and Support Line 24/7 1300 308 307
• Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
• MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
• Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
• Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or its COVID-19 support service 1800 512 348
• Headspace on 1800 650 890
• ReachOut at au.reachout.com
• Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN) on 1800 008 774
• Brother to Brother on 1800 435 799