A week after my mum’s 30th birthday, my brother died. I don’t remember this because it was 42 years ago and I wasn’t there to make a memory. Thomas was only nine months old and I wasn’t born yet. The strange reality I’ve come to accept is that if he hadn’t died – in an awful accident that haunts my parents and siblings still – I’d never have been born.
Thomas was a happy, sweet baby. In the too-few photos we have, he is smiling and dimpled. He looks like my other siblings and me. The pictures are all hard copy, small with round corners, slightly yellowed. In one he grins over my mum’s shoulder towards the camera and she gazes at Tom’s face in turn. I wish I could say exactly the right thing to save them both.
Mum and Dad adored Tom. My brother and sister did, too. Together they were a complete family of five, until they weren’t any more. And then I came along and they were once again – sort of.
It’s a strange place to occupy. I’m not grateful that he died. I would never want my parents and siblings to experience what they were forced to endure. None of them have ever made me feel like I owed Tom, or them, anything for the gift of being alive when he wasn’t. Far from it: I’ve felt cherished. But trauma shapes a family, even one as loving as mine.
Once, my mum showed me the letter she wrote to her own mother, our loving grandmother, after Tom’s death. It said that she and Dad had found the hope within themselves to try again. It’s a complex feeling, to be that hope.
Mum told me that the death of a child is like a knife blade your heart slowly knits around. It can twist with the same startling, sudden pain decades later. There is always a pause when a casual mention is made of her three children. The truth is she has four. I sign the card for Mother’s Day flowers from all of us, in birth order: Anna, Jon, Thomas and Lucy.
Thomas’s birthday is 29 August. It always will be. At some point I started messaging my parents on that day. It is a way to acknowledge him, and them. The same goes for that terrible day at the end of May. Tom saw just one spring and one summer. As autumn days grow shorter and the air sharpens, we think of the sunny baby who never lived through winter.
The reality is, statistically, you probably know someone who has lost a child: in pregnancy, soon after, or in infancy. It is probably more than one. You should always ask those people what they want, of course, but my general view is: remember those dates. Say the names of the babies we’ve lost. They are members of our families and they are alive when we speak of them.
A few years ago I finally looked up the meaning of the name Thomas. As the words appeared, I felt a lightness rise in me. Thomas: comes from the Hebrew word “ta’om,” meaning “twin”.
When I became a mother myself, I sometimes felt like a grown-up Tom was there with me. I imagined his steady, kind presence watching over me and his tiny nephew in the early morning dark; that deep, bleak time of exhaustion, loneliness, and body aches. My son carries his lost uncle’s name as a middle one, as does our brother Jon’s eldest son.
When my baby was nine months old, I tried hard not to let my fluttering mind alight on the razorback of history repeating itself. That dread didn’t disappear when he lived to 10 months, then 11; it just became a part of things, like grief does.
He’s now four years old, and I carry that fear in my shoe, a keen-edged pebble I step on occasionally. When I feel it, I nod to my brother Tom, who is part of me fundamentally: my DNA, my story, my family. A boy I never knew, but will always love.
Lucy Berry is a writer living and working in Melbourne on Wurundjeri country
