The Fruit of the Tree Read online

  Once he sat on a stool by the side of Karen’s cot and I heard him say, ‘Now Karen, I’m going to tell you all about an engine.’

  He had needed a companion for so long. Was it too late now, I wondered? Was the gap between them permanently unbridgeable?

  At least pint-sized Karen had some function—merely putting her pram in the garden gave him the confidence to play out there, for he had not lost his fear of being alone in the apparently vast open space.

  Very soon after her birth he asked me, ‘Will this baby die too, Mummy?’

  I could only answer in the way I had answered myself: ‘I don’t think God would be so unkind as to take this baby from us.’

  But who could be sure? If there was no God then nothing was sure; I had to turn myself away from that line of reasoning.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I would say. ‘You have tried my strength; I have tried to be strong, but please don’t ask me to go through it again. Please don’t let anything happen to this baby. I don’t think I could survive it.’

  In the middle of September, the New Year edition of the Synagogue Newsletter arrived at our house. Quickly I leafed through it, and then a surge of excitement as I discovered my own article faithfully reproduced in its entirety.

  Once again, I experienced a tremendous elation that was related as much to seeing my own name at the head of the article as to my success in publicising the nature of ‘cot death’.

  Within a week or so, I sent the article to my contact, Dr. Knight, at the British Guild, anxious to receive praise for my efforts. But, in spite of receiving welcome words of encouragement, I had to forego any further writing for the time being.

  Later the desire to write was to bubble up, reminding me of its existence, refusing to be pushed aside again. Words, descriptions would form in my mind, as I worked around the house, but for the moment there was no room in the already tight schedule for any extras.

  The most restful part of each day was the time I spent feeding Karen; blissfully I would sink onto my bed with my feet up, putting baby to the breast. How I appreciated those precious, peaceful moments. Once I had said, ‘A new baby is nothing more than a parasite, taking all and giving nothing. It’s constantly making demands—feeding, changing, bathing and so on—and complains when it doesn’t get what it wants.’

  Now, I reflected on how relaxing it was to deal with a baby after a demanding five-year-old. It didn’t argue, shout, fight, ask questions or make silly jokes. All it required was to be clean and fed and it was contented. How the perspective had changed!

  Karen was only five weeks old when we visited Michael’s mother on a pleasant October Sunday. Karla, my sister-in-law, who had a cold, telephoned to ask my feelings about her being there. It may have seemed excessively protective, but I had to say that I couldn’t deliberately allow Karen to be exposed to an infection, however mild at that age. So Karla nobly stayed at home while the rest of us enjoyed a family occasion. I had brought my camera and we photographed the six cousins together—eleven-year-old Stephen holding the baby and the other little boys arranged sitting and standing around. Then I held Karen while Michael photographed the two of us—at my request. Amanda’s photographs had meant a great deal to me, and I wanted to be sure I had a record of Karen.

  I lived with fear, but I accepted its presence as inevitable. The possibility of losing Karen could not be put from my mind, unlikely though it may have seemed to anyone else; now, as we entered the time of year when respiratory ailments were more common, I was aware of her increased vulnerability.

  One morning, I spent five or ten minutes chatting with the other mothers at the bus stop. As I left them, I was overcome with guilt at having left Karen unattended for such a long time. I ran panting back to the house, petrified at what I might find.

  The terrible panics occurred often, and each time, weak with relief, I would find a contented sleeping baby in the cot.

  Autumn crept past. Robert had mumps—and two bouts of bronchitis—but Karen was not affected.

  Twice I went to the doctor with the first symptoms of a cold.

  ‘Is there anything,’ I asked, ‘that can stop it in its tracks?’

  The doctor gave me something, and the cold did not develop. Goodness knows if it was psychological, for there is no cure, as we all know, for the common cold. But the desired result was achieved; baby Karen did not catch a cold from me or anyone else during her first winter.

  Sometimes I would hold her in my arms, and gaze at her thinking, ‘If you were to die tomorrow, I would have had this moment.’

  Each night I had to discipline myself to go to sleep; there would be no advantage to any member of the family, if I lay awake night after night in fear. So I would check her, listen to the quiet breathing, see the pink tones of her skin in the half-light and then walk out of the door. In my own bedroom, I would turn up the newly acquired baby alarm, listen again to the sound of even breathing, and then turn it right down, so that I could only hear her if she cried.

  Once or twice my nerve failed, and I would rush to her cot again. Sometimes a gentle touch to her body would immediately awaken her, for she was an extremely light sleeper, and I would have to give her a late night feed. Michael would grumble, ‘Have you woken her up again?’ He didn’t have my personality—he didn’t know of my fears—luckily for both of us. And when in the middle of the night, cries of hunger or thirst would shrill out, instead of blearily cursing, I always opened my eyes and thought, ‘Thank God, she’s alive.’

  But it was not an unhappy time—far from it. The insecurity lent a special value to her babyhood; each day was a heaven-sent gift. I was aware now that I had allowed Robert’s baby days to fly past unappreciated, always watching impatiently for the next stage. Now, as precious moments were savoured, I realised that I had actually gained something from Amanda’s death. For these days poised between terror and ecstasy had a bittersweet quality, and with the contrast of black days behind me, normality had suddenly become technicolour.

  I could remember with clarity that, a year ago, I thought no one else had ever suffered such a blow. To lose husband, wife, brother or sister could not be so bad as to lose one’s baby, I had secretly told myself. Humbly now, I recognised the arrogance of that assumption.

  On the contrary, I now felt privileged to have suffered the year of bereavement, without which I would not have known this magical contrast.

  In addition, Amanda’s death had not been a totally meaningless event as I had once bitterly thought, for it had caused me to grow up and look beyond my own needs, to see if I could help other people.

  Amanda, who had no life of her own, would nevertheless be remembered through anything I could do on her behalf.

  Spring came and passed, with its progress marked by the appearance of each new wave of flowers—the early bulbs, polyanthus, wallflowers, my own daffodils and the many coloured tulips. At the end of April, Karen was eight months old. It was a milestone—the period of greatest risk of cot death is between two and eight months, the most dangerous time of year, between October and April. But still, another month passed before I felt entirely safe.

  Then suddenly it was June. Suddenly the sun was shining down. In a spontaneous expression of joy, I ran outside and across the garden. The air was warm, the sky blue and the green grass firm and springy beneath my feet. I felt a moment’s solid happiness, tempered then momentarily by a swift fear. Nothing is ever sure; at each new stage of my baby’s life, there would be new dangers.

  But at least she would not slip away in the night without warning. She was mine now, really mine. And in that moment of happiness, I remembered again the commitment I had made.

  For a while, in a period of almost religious ecstasy, I believed I had found the answer to the tribulations of the world. God, I thought, did not necessarily spare us from all grief, but He did give us a remarkable ability to survive it, and the extraordinary happiness after the period of extreme pain was surely an enormous compensation for that pain.


  But later, humility followed. I could not, after all, justify the hideous suffering in the world; I could only see a purpose in my own period of sorrow.

  There came a time when I became complacent about my experience of bereavement and felt almost impatient with mothers who did not seem to be making a recovery from the death of a baby. Then I realised that I was making the same mistake that others had made and which had upset me at the time. No doubt they had said, ‘She’s young; she’ll have another baby; she’ll get over it.’ But it is simply not possible for a mother to look at the death of her baby in the long term. However good the eventual prognosis of her recovery is, it does not heal the sharp pain of the moment.

  In the five years following Karen’s birth, I wrote to several women whose names were passed to me. Sometimes the correspondence lasted for months with the exchange of seven or eight letters, each one, for me, an outpouring of past emotions.

  A letter on cot death was printed in the Evening Standard in 1973, which brought about some enquiries from Health Visitors, and a correspondence with a mother which developed into a still-continuing friendship.

  Articles written by me were placed in a third local Newsletter and the Jewish Chronicle in 1975 (for which, for the first time, I received payment, an important accolade for any would-be writer.)

  In 1975, I felt sufficiently detached from the situation to hold a coffee morning to raise funds for the Foundation, and this has become a small annual practice. On one of those occasions, I met a mother who, until that day, had been unable to accept the death of her baby, but at least after that, was able to express her feelings of sorrow.

  I am aware that numerically my efforts seem trivial, but at least they have been consistent, and when at any time I have been made aware of a mother grieving for a lost baby, my response has been immediate.

  Although, as a result of fund-raising, much useful research has been and continues to be carried out, the precise cause of cot death remains unexplained. It is suggested that ‘…S.I.D.S. probably results not from a single cause but from a variety of different factors which combine fatally while a child is passing through a vulnerable period of development…. ’

  But parents suddenly bereaved are much more likely now to receive automatic support, as a result of the work done by the Foundation and the British Guild, than they would have been at the time of Amanda’s death and before, and in this respect, real progress has been made.

  My children are no longer babies; to describe their lives and personalities now would be unfair to two young people who have not sought the limelight. Suffice it to say that Robert’s confidence increased and he became totally at home in the once alien woods and amongst his own group of friends. As Karen grew older, they grew together and were, after all, companions in games and squabbles and many other interests. Both children, with all their imperfections, seem very satisfactory to me.

  In the garden, my spindly fuchsia survived for many years, flowering briefly each year from early August to the first frost. When weather or disease or some other pest destroyed it, I did not replace it. We lost the plum trees, the pear trees and three of the apple trees. But the last apple eventually produced many crops and by then I had learned to be philosophical. Just as I waited for my unborn children and was eventually thankful and grateful for what I received, so I accepted, in the same spirit, the harvest of fruit from the trees.

  The End