19

Woke up with a terrible headache after dreaming that a hurricane was nearing our city.
We were somewhere near the busstation and I saw it coming.
Send Jim and the girls to the shopping centre, as they have a parking lot underneath, where they could hide.
And called the boys to close the windows and find a hidingplace too.

We don't have hurricanes here....

My hip feels better now, so that's OK. But I still have problems with my muscles. They feel heavy and weak, and maybe the headache has to do with that too. Don't know.
Maybe it's the flue or something, as I feel terribly cold at times and very hot later.
Or maybe it's the menopause again?
Don't know.

This morning the weather was great. Lots of sun. And I ate brambles from the garden. Just like that.
Most of them dried out during the first half of summer, but those that were left are delicious.

16 augustus

It's unbelievable how clear memories can be.
I know they're part of me, of the person who I am, but so much has happened in my life that one would expect everything to have become a blur, or that the images have lost accuracy.

There are years that the remembrance days of Jenny pass by with a bit of uncomfortable, unpleasant feelings, years that I cry, and years like this one that my thoughts and feelings reach out to the chronological time so many years ago.

Lars told me yesterday that he had seen "someone" a couple of evenings ago.
He had entered the room and walked towards the front of the house and suddenly he had to look back and he saw a girl sitting like she was crying.

As I know that signals of the other world sometimes reach ours, it made me feel sad that a child should cry and it makes me wonder who she is.
Is it Jenny? Or Winnie?
Or maybe Cindy's little sister?
I wish I could change the image Lars had.

15 augustus

19 years ago Jenny was born.
She was a beautiful baby.
But she died the day after she was born.

The first years after her death some people made clear they were still thinking of her, but now the day seems to pass like any other.
I can understand. Her life had no significance for them.

For me it meant the start of a large change, as I lost my naïvity about birth and having children.

Her death seemed to be a coïncidence, as I was asked not too long before if I wanted to join the team at neonatology as a psychologist.
I refused, because I felt too young and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to give parents the support they really needed.
I was already fed up with textbook psychology and already knew a good neighbour can do more than a normal psychologist. Especially in those days, when the death of a child was a subject that was a huga taboo.

But at the time we were already preparing a foundation to support parents with high risk pregnancies.
When I talked about this after Jenny died, a pastor told me just to kickstart the whole thing.
And so I did.

Since then I have been leading groups, councelling people individually and have done a ot more.

So Jenny's short life has touched quite some lifes.

Being on TV with a friend who also lost a baby to talk about our experiences raised a lot of interest in the subject, and I was "lucky" to meet someone who was very influential in the burrial-/grave-world, so we changed the way people deal with burrials and such.

A few years later I lost another baby, and that made me aware of even more changes that were needed, including some changes in the law.
It took a lot of effort and time to get these changes, but I got most of them.

So only one and a half day of living of one single little baby changed so much, that I almost can't imagine how it was before she died.
Tnhat was the time people didn't speak about dead children.

Just after Jenny died the undertaker came and my father and Jim dealt with him.
It was decided to have a short service at the hospital and then burry her.
As I has lost a lot of blood I wasn't allowed to go to the graveyard by the midwife and doctor, so I stayed at home with the only grandmother that was still living.
We talked about the chance of living Jenny missed, and about the feelings of guilt she experienced, as she wasn't afraid of death anymore and didn't mind to die. (She was far in her nineties).

A few hours later my uncle, who also lost children, sat here joking and making sarcastic remarks.
We never had a good relationship and I didn't like the way he was influencing the feel of the day.
he clearly couldn't deal with what was going on, and i coudln't deal with him.
So for the first time in my life I told him to change his tone or shut up, ofcourse resulting in one of those wellknown silences. Broken by his wife, who said she was very pleased with my reaction ans someone needed to stand up against the way he was behaving. (She never stood up against him... ever.)

Later my uncle and I got a good relationship.
It started with a visit at him in hospital.
We came from the pediatrician with the twins, and he was ready for an operation at the cardiology unit.
I just felt we had a chance to say goodbye, and he grasped the contact with both hands.
We had a couple of good talks and cleared the air between us. My experiences with Jenny enabled me to talk about his grief, thus facilitating the griefprocess within him to take place.
Little did we know at that time that he would die so soon.
Before he died he asked me to dress in a stone red suit he liked, and I did.
As I was waiting for the service to begin I was chocked to be the only color in a dark and white crowd.
It wasn't common use then that family spoke at the service. Only the priest did.
But he had asked me to speak, and so I did. Standing there with my stone-red suit, making people clear how important it is to grief, and how important good memories are, and that he sure must have wanted to say something to all of them by asking me to wear my stone-red suit.

So my mind wanders through memories, good and bad, while outside the garden is almost flooded by the rains.

Jenny was born at home and she was doing well.
At night she looked around, ending every fairytale about babies not being able to see.
I'm so happy I've spend almost every minute of her life with her.

The next day she stopped breathing in my arms.
Resuscitation at home, in the car and at hospital didn't help.

She changed my life, and many other lifes... and other people have forgotten her.......