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INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE
A woman's journal through & Still birth
INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE
A woman's journal through & Still birth
Malika Ndlovu
Publication © Modjaji Books 2009
Text © Malika Ndlovu 2009
First published in 2009 by Modjaji Books, CC
P O Box 385, Athlone, 7760
ISBN 978-0-9802729-3-2
Book and cover design by Natascha Mostert
Edited by Colleen Crawford Cousins and Colleen Higgs
Cover Art by Colleen Crawford Cousins
Lettering by Hannah Morris
Photographer: Charley Pollard
Printed and bound by Megadigital, Cape Town
Set in Garamond 12/14 pt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holders.
For I man Bongiwe Ndlovu
Born and buried
3rd January 2003
CONTENTS
Invisible earthquake
Malika's journal
Malika's postscript
Accompanying
by Zubeida Bassadien and Muriel Johnstone, maternity hospital social workers
Women and stillbirth: a medical perspective
by Sue Fawcus, specialist obstetrician
Resouece List
Acknowledgements
Author's Bio
2003
1st January, 15h05
I have just taken the tablet to catalyse the contractions that will deliver you, out of your nest, my womb. I sit with a lit candle in the garden, listening to a baby crying next door, wind blowing through the trees, a plane flying over high above. How do I leave home today full of you and come home tomorrow, empty? My mind swings between dead calm practicalities of to do lists and necessary arrangements, to tears cutting me down to a deep quiet grief I cannot fully feel even though I know it is there.
How could I imagine that your last fevered fluttering was goodbye? How can I hold the thought that you have been sleeping lifeless inside of me since then, already gone? It's been almost four days. I race from recollecting all the signs that came before to tell us that this was where your path would lead, signs that I shut out so many times, clear calls for me to face the silence of you no longer kicking within me.
This morning in the shower a clear image of these few words on a blank page came to me:
“Your death has changed my life.”
11th January, 12h45
I am paralysed, yet I want to surrender. I'm surprised at how hours pass, days, now one week. I want to hold on, hold back, slow down for fear of further distance from you, from the sensitivity of my still-leaking breasts, from the flow of blood that still connects us so intimately. I don't want time to take these sensations of you away from me. I also want time to ease the sharp pain of memory that these bring so instantly.
Any moment could be the point of bursting, of breaking down at the sadness of our story, the cruel if-onlys and what-ifs. Baby items fall across my path unexpectedly and I must pack them away, not for two months till your due date, but for an indefinite period now.
I so much wanted to touch you. Now I nuzzle your brother a little deeper, a little longer than usual, imagining your satin-soft skin against my lips. I was afraid I might touch you too much, you – so fragile and pure, afraid too, of what holding you too long would do to me when the time for letting go came. So I tenderly stroked you with my fingertips and my breath. I wrapped you in a cloth that I knew I would bury too, my fiery yellow sarong. In the few hours we shared alone in that delivery room, I held you until my arms ached before putting you in the crib beside my bed, using a thin scarf to shade you from the glare of hospital lights and prying eyes of hospital staff checking in on me. I tried to maintain some kind of cocoon, the way mothers swaddle their newborns.
The days pass with or without my consent. I visit your grave for the second time, on the seventh day since your birth – one of the many, many cycles that call to be completed. Since that turning point announcement of “no foetal heartbeat” initiated me into that enormous clan who know the death of a beloved.
I am shaped by your absence, haunted by the detail of you.
13th January, 00h40
No milk flowed today. The aches, the leaking and bleeding subside. I feel them fade like another sorrowful tide of goodbyes. Again I am letting go in ways I have no control over.
I chanted and sang with her on stage, played music with shakers and words. I soaked with her in bubble baths, smiled alone in the dark with my palms resting on either side of my naked belly, like two ever-eager ears straining for a hint to kick-start our midnight conversations. I felt her take over my body, creating that familiar feeling of unbalance as my back arched to compensate for a larger belly, forcing me into larger waistlines and super-comfy shoes, clicking my bones in and out of place, pinching a nerve here and there, making me jump or sit upright in pain or fright.
14th January, 22h02
What time zone is this? Fourteen days have escaped my grasp. The memory of you, the loss of you, separation from you is so present, yet I can also call it past. How can I lie in the same positions, wear the same shoes or preggy clothes, sit in the same chair, walk through the same house, when nothing is the same without you?
Everything has changed since you. I do not feel the same, breathe the same, think the same, see things in the same way. The only consistent element is your silence, your absence and the thin line of events that mark my mental calendar, the sudden fall from joyful anticipation to sorrow-filled waiting.
21st January, 12h05
I know you are no longer living
In
