FROM THE EDITOR

YVONNE KERR

This week’s cover story has sent me into a anxiety-driven spin. I’ve been creeping in and out of my son’s nursery after dark, listening for a waft of breath, peering through the bars of his cot for the tiniest twitch. The horror of Jan Pryor’s story is unfathomable – losing a child so young to cot death, with no answers or explanation to ease the grief, the guilt, or the pain. There should be no guilt, but inevitably, as Pryor describes, there is, and plenty of it.

New Zealand’s infant death rate has fallen by 21 per cent from 1996, but cot death still claimed 45 Kiwi babies in 2014. Pryor went on to become a psychologist and families commissioner. She kept a diary, chronicling her feelings, her struggles, her journey – what she has called her “slow march to acceptance” – how her family came to terms with the loss, and the eventual break up of her marriage. This diary forms the foundation of her just-published memoir After Alexander.

As readers, we can all take something from Pryor’s advice to others/us who wish to console, sympathise or relate in some way, in a well-meaning but sometimes misguided effort to feel useful or to offer help following the sudden passing of a person, of any age. What can you say? Well, not: “I know how you feel – my cat died last month.” And certainly not: “It was meant to be.” There is no reasoning when it comes to the sudden death of a child. Pryor suggests instead asking what the baby was like, because she says “it’s the denial of their existence that is the most painful I think, for parents”. Turn to page 8.