Rohan Silva
How do we fit what happens to us into life without turning it into an anecdote with no teeth and a punchline you’ll mouth over and over for years to come.” That line comes from John Gaure’s play Six Degrees of Separation, and it’s been on my mind recently.
My wife Kate gave birth to a baby girl named Zola in mid-March this year but tragically our daughter died just a few hours after being born. Kate then became extremely ill from the same infection that overwhelmed the baby. (Fortunately, my wife has now mostly recovered physically.)
And that sentence you’ve just read — the one that started with “My wife Kate gave birth…” — is one that I’ve spoken or written so many times since Zola passed away that for me it’s become a bit of a dead phrase with “no teeth”. Because it’s so hard to talk to people about what happened, and yet you need others to know, so they understand what you’ve just been through, and why you might be unaccountably sad or angry.
Take work colleagues, for example. Society has come a long way when it comes to paternity leave, and had Zola lived, no one would have minded if I’d had months away from my work to spend time with my daughter. But if your baby dies, how much time off do you get to grieve? I was scrambling to close an investment round for my business when Zola was born and passed away, and so I only managed to have a few days away from work.
I knew I needed to take time to process what had happened but I also couldn’t neglect the job of keeping my company afloat. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t partly appreciate having something to distract myself with — and it was the same with the hospital in Los Angeles where Zola was born and died.
In the days afterwards we had so many questions and complaints about what had happened, so I busied myself with meetings with doctors, organising my feedback and badgering the medical staff to make changes. But as with getting pulled back into work, the hospital stuff was a distraction — and detracted from the necessary and slow process of processing the loss of a child.
Because it does take time. Six months on, I wouldn’t say that I’ve fully recovered yet, whatever that means.
So I think we do need to talk about how much paid leave people should get from their employer if their child dies. Tragedies do happen, no matter how much we hope they don’t. And as for finding another way to tell people what happened to my daughter Zola, perhaps I’ll get there in time. Perhaps writing this could be a start.
