Heavenly Beverley : Lifetimes Remembered.

Thirty years ago I was a very different woman. I was still short, but I was slimmer, fitter and younger. Over the course of a few years, I met a number of extraordinary women from different walks of life, from all over Western Australia, whom I would have been unlikely to meet in other circumstances. The connection between us all was the loss of our babies.

I was pregnant for the first time in spring 1984. My then husband and I had been married for nearly four years. I longed to be a mother. I always had. So, I was delighted when I found myself pregnant not long after coming off the contraceptive pill.

My pregnancy lasted for seventeen blissful weeks. I was just into maternity clothes at the end of January 1985. I had a bit of spotting and was afraid. I was under a local GP so we toddled down to a local hospital. I was told to go home and wait. The following day the bleeding was worse and I was in pain. This time, the local hospital sent me to the women's hospital to be examined. I was hospitalised on one of the wards.

I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that I was terrified. The pain was relentless and I thought I needed a bedpan. This was brought and I miscarried my baby. All hell broke loose afterwards. An injection was shoved into my bottom and I was out like a light. The following day I had a D&C. My baby was "disposed of"'. I was discharged the next morning. Five days later, my milk came in.

I woke up believing I had some terrible infection. My breasts were like rocks, then as I watched, breast milk leaked slowly down my tummy. I thought I was losing my mind. My body image, my self-belief, my confidence as a woman/mother were all destroyed. How could I have milk with no baby to feed?

My mood plunged. I didn't know what to do, who to see, what to say. I bumbled around in a never ending fog of sadness for days. Then, and I can't remember how, I discovered an obscure little organisation named SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support). I went to the first support meeting and talked as much as I could. These women were like me!

They had all started pregnancy expecting a live baby at the end of nine months. We were all together as this happy event hadn't eventuated. I discovered this suffocating sadness was grief. Suddenly, I was no longer alone anymore.

At times, I felt a bit of a fraud as I'd "only had a miscarriage". This was my perception, not anyone else's. Many years later, I realised that pregnancy itself is an illusion. All the women I've met who have survived a pregnancy loss are not affected by the actual time frame of this dreadful event. Regardless of the timing, our babies died. Not embryos or foetuses. Babies. And all our hopes and dreams for those children died with them. That was the legacy of grief.

I have made lifelong friends. Although we were initially linked by the loss of our babies, seeing these other women again is a joy to be treasured. We are alive and some of us have gone on to have further babies. Those who hadn't, kept their babies safe in their hearts forever.

Today, I reconnected with two of these amazing women. I haven't seen Nina and Noeleen for over twenty-five years. Nina and I have remarried two wonderful men, a great improvement of our first two husbands. Noeleen is single but seemed pretty content. We looked at photos of our now grown up children, swapped stories of families, homes, pets and caught up on two decades of our lives.

We remembered an appalling video watched whilst Nina's dog had an epileptic fit under my bed. Our daughters were born exactly a week apart. She reminded me of being aghast when Nina used toilet paper to blow her daughter's nose. I was in a mental health unit at the time but I had forgotten just how anal retentive I'd been.

I had met Noeleen a couple of years after Nina. I remember her losses particularly poignantly - two of her boys died. I think I'd had my second pregnancy loss around the same time and to meet her gave me a reality to hang onto when the rest of my world had descended into chaos.

And so our babies who are longer with us were able to move in and out of our conversations quite matter of factly. This is not because we don't still love them and wish they were alive. We do. But we don't have to explain this to each other.

Every now and then, without warning, grief reappears and takes our hands. This happens, rather like shit. The reassuring warmth that was SANDS in my earlier life and has rematerialised in the form of Nina and Noeleen reminds me how to survive. How to keep loving. How to live with these precious memories.