Being a parent is knowing that together, you've created a masterpiece.

K B Mallion

She was a masterpiece.

Heidi-May, she was our masterpiece.

A tiny and exquisite creation that was heartbreakingly born without taking a single life-giving breath, but my little girl, she has never been forgotten.

When the midwife solemnly handed my, all too still baby, to me; I held her, I held her for as long as I could.

In my overwhelmingly sad arms, I kept whispering to Heidi-May how beautiful and how perfect she was, even though I knew she couldn't hear me. I studied her doll-like fingers. I kept willing those breathtakingly small fingertips to curl themselves around my index finger, knowing that it never would happen, but oh, I imagined it happening a million times over.

Wrapped in the softest fleece that me and my husband could buy, and the pale lilac colour cocooning her lifeless body—our hearts simultaneously broke into pieces that would never be fixed.

It was a blanket that we had excitedly bought together, a blanket that was supposed to keep our little girl all snuggly and warm when we finally got to bring her home after her wonderful arrival.

But that blanket became so much more than that. That blanket was to stay with our baby girl. It would stay with her forever.

Through my raw and stinging tears, I remember thinking why us? Why her?

She was too precious to not be breathing.

She was too beautiful to not be alive.

Heart-ripping sobs eventually echoed all around the quiet maternity room, while in another room, I could hear a newborn crying itself into the world.

But in my world.

In our tragic world.

My baby girl would never cry.

My baby girl would never suckle from me.

She would never hear her mummy's voice.

She would never smell me.

And she would never grow up.

Heidi-May would eternally sleep.

Even though I had just become a mother and my husband had just become a father, we would never get to parent our baby girl, and that lacerated our hearts.

We were parents, yet we would never watch Heidi-May reach all of her milestones. We would never get to see her wean, crawl, toddle and walk. We would never see her nervous first day at primary school or her last day ever at Secondary school.

We wouldn't get to see the teenager she might have been or the woman that she should have one day become.

All of it was gone.

All of it tragically stripped away. 

Stripped away by something that never could be explained to us.

'Unexplained stillbirth' that somehow was never enough.

That never gave me the reason why Heidi-May didn't ever come home with us. It never gave me the reason why she had died. It never told me why. No one, could ever tell me why.

And the why still haunts me.

I still sadly fall asleep with it, and depressingly still wake up with it.

Everyone around me thinks that I should now be trying to move on from the death of Heidi-May. Their pitying patience with me, has gradually began to wane. 

It's time to get your life back.

It's time to maybe try for another baby.

That's what my husband, friends, family and colleagues all keep telling me. They're all just saying it in very different and callous ways.

And I have tried to move forward in my life. I've tried to erase Heidi's-May's tiny little face from my mind, just so I could get dressed and return to my job as a medical secretary.

I have, god I really have!

But wherever I am, whatever I am doing—I just can't forget her.

As the months have numbingly rolled into one another, I have been feeling like she's all around me. Even though I am constantly being reminded that she is gone, I am now slowly beginning to believe that my beautiful Heidi-May stayed.