After Alexander: coping with cot death
‘‘It was meant to be,’’ said some misguided comforters. No, it wasn’t. Jan Pryor reflects on the agony of losing a child, and how parents - and those close to them - navigate the difficult straits of grief. reports.
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 who 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
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 time 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
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 person, religious-based platitudes were more salt than salve.
‘‘The one that got to me most was ‘It was meant to be’. Or ‘You’ll get over it - have another baby’. My nicer self says that’s all people can think of to say. If I was giving advice it would be, for goodness sake, don’t say those things.
‘‘In retrospect the most wonderful supportive thing was when somebody said ‘Tell me about him - what was he like?’ I can’t advise people enough to say that to someone whose lost someone, because it acknowledges their existence, and it’s the denial of their existence that is the most painful I think, for parents.’’
Resilient grieving
It took time for Pryor to realise she was happy she’d had Alexander. That she wouldn’t take back the four months they’d had with him, even if it would erase the grief.
After a few months, Jim suggested they try for another baby. Pryor was terrified of forgetting Alexander; of replacing him. Of it happening again.
‘‘Becoming pregnant so quickly felt like getting on an international flight soon after a major plane disaster. The odds were good, but crashes happen,’’ she writes.
But the hole Alexander left persisted, even as a new baby grew. A wise older woman who lost a baby at a similar age counselled Pryor that she wasn’t forgetting, but that her grief was leaning back enough to let in gratitude and appreciation for his life.
A former academic, Pryor doesn’t buy the Kubler-Ross stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. While it’s tempting to assign a neat framework of expectation, emotions don’t follow linear rules.
‘‘I can see why people think it’s convenient, but I actually don’t think it’s the real world. I actually think it’s much more messy. You ebb and flow backwards and forwards.’’
Occasionally, a stab of pain or panic would catch Pryor unawares. The terror of quiet from new baby Esther’s cocoon at her feet, as Pryor waited in the post office queue. Or the world going black in a neonatal intensive care ward, as the sight of a dark-haired baby dying without reason sent her crumpling to the floor. That happened 12 long years after Alexander’s death.
But mostly, she and Jim got on with life. With looking after their two children. With loving Esther when she arrived. Pryor prefers George Bonanno’s theory of resilient grieving - the idea most people grieve and continue to function. They don’t get over it, but they do change.
‘‘One of the best things about writing the book was that I realised how much that’s become part of who I am. Not in any kind of sentimental way - but I was the mother of a child who died.’’
After Alexander
Every year on Alexander’s birthday and the day he died, Pryor lights a candle.
She holds on to the memories - his delight as she bounced him on the bed. The four of them - Simon, Emily, Jim and her - each taking a corner of his buggy as they navigated the stairs of the Paris metro on a precious family holiday, the kids singing to him.
If she could go back, Pryor would have a proper funeral - in a garden, filled with the people who loved Alexander. It’s no accident she is now a funeral celebrant - offering the kind of special, nonreligious ritual that Alexander never had.
Alexander’s death was classified as cot death. Looking for explanation, Pryor dug into cot death research. But in the end, she had to accept that science simply had no answers.
Three decades on we know parental smoking and sleeping position are risk factors, and New Zealand’s infant death rate has fallen 21 per cent, from 1996 to 2014. But sudden unexpected death still claimed 45 Kiwi babies in 2014.
Like many couples suffering the loss of a child, Pryor’s marriage did not survive. For six years after Alexander’s death, they carried on. Jim kind of shut down - and society offered little support - while Pryor was this ‘‘weepy, needy woman’’. It’s impossible to know how much grief was to blame, but looking back, Pryor sees they didn’t talk enough.
‘‘The main thing we didn’t do - and I know this is a very important failure and message - is we didn’t attend to our relationship, and we should have. We were just so focused on the kids.’’
There are lingering anxieties, too. Pryor describes her world view as ‘‘vulnerable optimism’’. Before, she simply saw the world as benign. Esther had a baby monitor - in those days a crude and uncommon machine. As the children grew, she was vigilant, but not suffocating. And when grandchildren arrived, Pryor fretted, but forgave herself.
The act of writing After Alexander - drawing on diary entries from the time - helped Pryor make sense of the process she’d been through. She hopes her story will help others acknowledge their own grief, and the change that loss has wrought in their own lives.
‘‘Now as I look back over all of that 35 years later, I realise the enormity of the impact an event like that has. And these events go unrecognised I think, for many people. A miscarriage is not often discussed; losing a child at birth. These are huge events in people’s lives and I think many people are encouraged to just not talk about it. I have come out a much stronger person, I know myself better. I don’t regret, even for a second, having had him. It was a tragic and in some ways a wonderful experience.’’