A few weeks ago, my baby turned 12 weeks old. His middle name, Lorcan, means ‘little fierce one’ in Irish and although I’ve always loved it, the name took on new meaning for me during the pregnancy.
The last time we marked 12 weeks was at his dating scan: the ultrasound that marks the end of the first trimester and usually - hopefully - the viability of the pregnancy. At the end of the scan, I burst into tears: big, heaving sobs. The sonographer - who had initially seemed like quite a stern, matronly woman - soothed me like a child: ‘my dear, my dear, what’s wrong?’ I told her it had been the longest 12 weeks of my life and explained that I had suffered a miscarriage at this point during my last pregnancy. She didn’t miss a beat before replying: ‘He just went away for a little bit but now he’s back! He came back!’
My anxiety never went away completely, fizzing just below the surface for much of my pregnancy, but I found so much comfort in that idea. Here he was, fiercely hanging on this time - and if he could be strong, then so could I.
The same day he turned 12 weeks old, I found out I had lost a best friend to suicide. She too had fought fiercely, for as long as she could against a cruel, unrelenting illness.
I was 18 when I met my friend, working together in a bar in Notting Hill. The first shift we did together, we got drunk on tequila and went to a nearby club after work. I wasn’t the dancing type (I was still deeply uncomfortable in my own skin), but I would have followed her almost anywhere. It helped that she exuded enough confidence for the both of us: I’d never met anyone so fucking cool. She had perpetual girl-in-the-year-above-at-school energy, even though she was technically a month younger than me. She looked like a young Kirsten Dunst, with Chloe Sevigny’s style and Kate Moss’ mischievous twinkle in her eye.
Slick with sweat, shouting over the music, and between yet more shots of tequila, we decided to get piercings on Portobello Road the next morning. It was the sort of drunken promise you make with a stranger in the ladies’ loos, convinced you’ve found your new best friend. The sort of promise that usually ends up being empty in the cold light of sobriety. We met at 11am the next day with last night’s eye makeup softly smeared in the way only teenagers can get away with. It never even crossed my mind that we wouldn't follow through with the plan. She held my hand as a woman with roughly 15 facial piercings punctured me. The piercing was ill-judged but I was right about one thing: I had found my new best friend.
She held my hand countless times over the next 15 years, going to university together in Leeds and then moving back to London to spend our twenties in flats 10 minutes apart, but the last time I saw her, it was my baby boy she held.
There is no better feeling than seeing your friends hold your baby. Watching your two greatest sources of joy collide induces almost mind-bending levels of euphoria, even more so with the ones who’ve known you the longest - those who have seen and loved every iteration of you. I will be grateful for the rest of my life that she was able to meet my baby, and to meet me as a mother.
I have so much to thank her for. Before the interview for my first internship in the fashion industry, the one that arguably kickstarted my career, she let me raid her wardrobe. I borrowed a Louis Vuitton backpack and when I got the job, we joked it was down to the sheer power of the bag. We laughed as we imagined me walking into the interview, silently holding the bag up like Simba in The Lion King and then walking back out again: job secured. Of course it wasn’t the bag: it was the pep talk she had given me that really clinched it.
When I had the miscarriage, she was still mourning her mother. Despite that, she made enormous amounts of space for my sadness, showing up for me when I know it would have been much, much easier for her not to. She was the first person to help me label my pain as grief, despite me feeling like I had no right to the word, which proved a huge step towards healing for me. Naively, I thought she’d taught me all I needed to know about grief. I’d thought wrong.
Just as I had during the pregnancy, I have once more found myself seeking strength in my son. In the days that followed her death, I held him closer and tighter than ever. For as long as I was tending to his simple needs, I could delay the emotions I knew would engulf me. The more menial or physical the task, the better. I changed his nappy at comically regular intervals with slow, painstaking care. I became acutely aware of every hair on his head and studied his toes like I was scared one might fall off. I disassociated via acts of service and, for a while, it worked. At least, for as long as he was awake.
In the early days of his life, I would fall asleep with my hand on his chest, terrified that he might suddenly stop breathing. I’m back to watching his chest slowly rise and fall, but these days I find it harder to fall asleep, more aware than ever of the fragility of life.
At first I lay awake thinking of the myriad parallel universes in which I could have changed her course of actions, racking my brain for signs I missed and analysing messages from the days that preceded again and again with a magnifying glass. Our last phone conversation was about sex after having a baby. I’ll spare you the intimate details - something she never did: she was refreshingly and consistently candid, just another of her wonderful qualities - but it was a typical one for us: silly and giggly, but unflinchingly honest, and with no subject off the table. Having started the conversation anxious, I finished it feeling lighter. I would have done anything in this world to do the same for her.
More recently, my thoughts have turned to desperately brainstorming ways in which I might shield my baby from this level of pain for the rest of his life. Not just the devastation I’m experiencing personally, but the unfathomable cruelty happening across the world. I have thought a lot about a poem my Dad wrote. He wrote it some years ago, and even read it on my wedding day, but the lines resonate with me now on a much deeper level.
Despite him feeling like he’d never have the right ones, these words of his have brought me more comfort now than I think my Dad ever imagined when writing them.
I can only hope my little fierce one grows up to be as strong as he was in my belly. I know I will never have the words for all of life’s cruelties either, and I’m certainly no poet, but one day I will tell my son all about my beautiful friend. I will tell him how proud I was to know her; how unreasonably cool she looked in dungarees (or literally anything she wore); how much she loved Coronation Street, Notting Hill Carnival and her children; how brutal her illness was; how for weeks after her death, her naughty, throaty chuckle echoed in my ears; how there will never be a day where I won’t miss her; and how she was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. Because this is it, all of it: true life.
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙