From agony to appreciation
“It was meant to be,” said some misguided comforters. No, it wasn’t. Jan Pryor reflects on the agony of losing a baby to cot death, and how parents – and those close to them – navigate the difficult straits of grief. By Nikki Macdonald.
It was a sunny English spring day – blackbirds, peanut butter sandwiches, and a baby’s bed gone deathly silent. Thirty-seven years on, retelling the trauma of that ambulance ride to London’s Great Ormond St Hospital can still reduce Jan Pryor to tears. Gone in an instant, the perfect family of five that had felt so right. Gone in an instant, the bubbly little man that had been the centre of their world for four months.
It’s taken more than three decades for Pryor to tell baby Alexander’s story – in public, at least. But writing her memoir After Alexander wasn’t “this great, miserable, sad, tearful exercise”. Instead, it’s a celebration of her baby’s short life, and a diary of one woman’s grieving, informed by her professional background as a psychologist and former families commissioner. It’s a story not of “getting over” the death of a child, but of understanding how a tragedy experienced by hundreds of parents every year leaves an indelible impression on a life.
SHOCK
“As the breast milk surged and receded and surged, so too did the hope. The delusion disappeared with the last of my milk” – an excerpt from Pryor’s diary.
It was April 1981 and Pryor was in England for a year with her GP husband Jim, son Simon and daughter Emily. Baby Alexander arrived shortly after they did. Pryor was taking a year off her psychology studies to spend time with the kids.
It was a beautiful day and she and her sister Vellyn planned to take all their children for a walk in the fields. Pryor checked on Alexander, but he was still napping, so she made peanut butter sandwiches.
Vellyn was a nurse. She resuscitated Alexander, after Pryor found him still, unbreathing on his sheepskin. Pryor and Jim spent two days staring at monitors at his hospital bedside while doctors tried to find out what was wrong. They never did. They had to agree to switch off the life support. Pryor cancelled her appointment to have her tubes tied – the family was no longer complete.
Through the numb shock, they made arrangements. The funeral was awful – the tiny white coffin adrift in the too-big crematorium chapel. Ten people in a space for 150. Pryor delivered six sentences from crumpled cardboard, followed by Beethoven. There was no ritual, no fitting release. Emily waited for the little coffin to fly out the crematorium chimney towards heaven. It never did.
Jim went back to work at the medical centre in the village. Nobody thought to ask him how he was. The kids went back to school and Pryor was left alone, in a home filled with absence.
“It’s hard to explain why it was so devastating. I think what it did was completely throw the family. Because there’d been four months of everybody adoring this child – the two children and my husband. We were so happy to have him. I talk about what might have been – you can’t know, but you’re mourning what he might be.”
BLAME
“A sting in the soggy mess of sadness was the possibility that I might have done something to prevent him dying. I lay in a bath until the water chilled, and I relived that Friday afternoon second by second, rearranged it, made things happen differently.” At 72, Pryor has lost her edges. Her grey hair is fringed with white. Her voice has a mellow, even tone that rises and falls without prickling with emotion. The blame and anger are long gone.
“Time softens,” she says. But then, the blame and anger were real and corrosive. After Alexander died, she blamed herself.
“Why didn’t I pick him up when I went up first? Maybe we shouldn’t have given him yoghurt at lunchtime. So you think, ‘What if, what if, what if?’”
And then she blamed everyone else – her nurse sister, for not bringing him fully back to life; the anaesthetist; the ambulance driver; Jim.
As time passed, she realised blame wasn’t helping anyone. So she thought instead about all the times she must have saved her children: taking them to the doctor; catching them before they ran on the road; strapping them into the car.
What she didn’t realise, was her children were also blaming themselves. Years later, Emily said she thought it was her fault Alexander had died, because she’d asked for a peanut butter sandwich.
“For years that little girl carried that. Children blame themselves for everything – I think we forget this so much. It’s just a cognitive stage they go through. It’s terribly important to tell children it’s not their fault. Kids need to be told again and again and again.”
YOU’LL GET OVER IT
“I know how you feel – my cat died last month,” a neighbour soothed.
“Please don’t worry about your baby. He is safe in heaven with God and he has puppies to play with,” one of Jim’s medical colleagues wrote.
“It would be worse if he was older.”
One young woman in the village avoided Pryor like the plague. She had a baby the same age – “I think she was terrified that somehow I was contagious.”
Pryor admits her grief was still too raw to be consoled by anything or anyone. But to a secular