I Couldn't Care Less: To have Loved and Lost (Part 1)
Created | Updated Sep 9, 2012
I Couldn't Care Less: To have Loved and Lost (Part 1)
Part one? Because I had this titled applied to an article (part 2, in fact) when I realised that the phrase can mean so many things. This is odd, considering how appalling trite the actual phrase is. 'Tis better' apparently 'to have loved and lost than never have loved at all'. According to a cursory glance at google, these words can be attributed to Alfred Lord Tennyson, who is a poet and therefore allowed to talk rubbish as long as it rhymes. Quite apart from being rather two glib for my liking, the two states are, as far as I can tell, mutually exclusive and since no two separate people's emotions can really be compared the assertion is unverifiable. There.
Anyway, there are plenty of potential ways to love and lose. Your loved one could die. Or leave you. Perhaps you left them, or drove them away. Perhaps it was a love unrequited, or even untested. I have two more to offer the pack, and here is the first:
My attention was recently drawn to a charity on the lookout for people like me. I'll cut to the chase: they are a charity called Saying Goodbye and they are trying to encourage fathers who have lost a child to get involved because they want both partners' pain to be equally recognised in the loss. We lost three, none more developed than three months, and none of which we were aware before they were gone.
We didn't want kids, you see. We were both very active in our not wanting kids. As active as it is possible to be while still burning off a few calories. And this is the first and nastiest aspect of the whole business. My wife really isn't very keen on kids at all. She certainly did not want one growing inside her and found the post miscarriage 'vacuuming' as she calls it, distressing and invasive. But the problem I concerned myself most with is that her hormones kicked off some unwanted latent maternal instinct. How cruel can you possibly be to a person? She didn't want kids, so she is given one, then she has it taken from her and is left with the confused feeling of sorting of wanting kids even though she doesn't like them at all. Three times. That's bloody harsh, no two ways about it.
Well, that's her bit, what about mine? The first thing is that I had a vasectomy. Apart from the pain killing injections (anaesthetists just love irony) it was not painful, just a little odd. And I got to lie around for a week on doctor's orders. But what about my pain, what about my grief?
Well. . . I have a confession to make. I didn't feel any. I'm sorry, but I just didn't. I think this is because I never got to see, or consider any of the unborn little ones. Never irritated people by showing them sonogram images, shopped for prams, argued about names or wondered whether we wanted to know the sex of the baby. I had never, on any occasion, developed a sense of this little dividing mass of cells being a person. As I said, the first I knew of them, they were gone. Of course this does leave me a little scared. Does this mean that I am callous monster? Does this make me an unfeeling robot, unable to feel real emotions. I don't cry much. Does this mean that I have supressed the grief I secretly feel and that one day the whole massive mess of pain and loss will come bursting out and overwhelm me completely.
As it happens, I don't think so. I feel what I feel and that's it. Feelings aren't right or wrong, they just are. So that's my message to you, Dads – feel what you feel and don't be ashamed. If this means crying every drop of moisture out of your body and shaking uncontrollably in loss and grief then do so, and do so with the knowledge that it does not stain your character one iota. But if you don't, or can't, then let that be. You're only human.
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