An appointment to go through your daughter’s post mortem results isn’t something I had on my 2024 bingo card when finding out I was pregnant only a year earlier. It ended up being a date I anticipated for months after she passed away with no clear explanation. We ended up only having a few days notice in the end which was probably a good thing because the anticipation could only build so much. I came to weirdly look forward to this appointment. It was a Friday and I took the call to make the appointment only a few days before, I’ll never forget the feeling of answering the phone to ‘is that Astrid’s mum?’. Our daughter’s kind consultant called to let me know that he had the report and made the appointment to go through it together. His voice is one I feel I’ll remember with fondness, there in so many of the hard moments but somehow getting it just right. I didn’t really want to hear the ‘why’ from anyone else.

We took the drive to Liverpool and faced the strangely familiar yet different Alder Hey. So much would have happened there in the 4 months since we visited yet it felt like I was going home. Somehow it felt okay in those early days to imagine my girl still up on the first floor in PICU, I could be okay with not being with her as long as I knew she was getting looked after. It reminds me of the Judgement of Solomon where he determined who the true mother of a baby was by proposing to cut it in half to give one half to each of the women claiming it was hers. Of course, the actual mother said give it to the other woman to save it from harm instead. As odd and pardoxical that sounds, it’s how I felt. I don’t feel as strongly about that now, but do still feel comforted that she’s somehow there still if I can’t look after her physical needs.

I did have a real reality check after we left and I realised the two worlds I was holding, one where they were still looking after her and working out how to help, and the other where I just found out the true extent to how ill she was and how they simply couldn’t work together. These realities are at odds with one another, but in the same way it was clear at one point in Astrid’s PICU journey that even if she did come home she wouldn’t be well, while at the same time being stabilised by the minute, we planned these two futures in parallel, holding onto hope and reality in a way that only being bedside in intensive care can provide I think, certainly for me anyway. It was a hard realisation that perhaps she wasn’t there in her familiar bay, on the pod I walked to down that yellow corridor so many times, but grief and loss are so layered that somehow it still gives me comfort to imagine her there, in that warm sunny room, surrounded by people adamant to work her little puzzling body out, and that comfort is just what I need some days and do I’m not going to question it too much, it’s comfort and I’ll take it.

Knowing the technical ‘why’ her little body was so unwell when she was born has helped, it’s allowed me to apply some logic to a situation that no one anticipated. We are a long way from full answers but knowing as much as we do has provided me with the ability to put a story together in my mind, in an attempt to make sense of it. I look forward to and dread a call that could happen anytime in the future where medical research and genetic testing have come a long enough way to tell us something we don’t know today, I can’t put life anymore on hold for that day but the hope for more answers will simmer on in the background and I feel I’ll always look forward signs and stories similar to ours, holding onto familiarity and another puzzle piece I can put together. What having a medical diagnosis doesn’t provide is the bigger reason, I know what caused the circumstances but not why that was what happened, for that I will have to wait for I’m sure.

I’m never comforted by others saying there was a ‘plan’ or ‘part of a bigger picture’ or any other (however true it may feel to them) platitudes, but I do get comfort in my own conclusions. I don’t feel like ‘things went wrong’ or ‘she was too perfect’ but she had a life, a full one that was far shorter than we had hoped for but I do believe she did the job she was born to do and I’ll find out more one day. My job is to now continue until that time and make the most of it, finding more puzzle pieces along the way and discovering new ways to be our girl’s mother.