Real Life the picture that means so much
When Sandie Christie lost her twins, she made sure they’d never be forgotten...
When you look at this picture, at first glance you probably see a happy couple enjoying some spring sunshine in the park. But if you look closely you’ll see the tears filling my husband Grant’s eyes. Even now, I can still feel the bittersweet pangs of pride and grief.
We found out we were expecting twins in November 2012. Grant and I already had a son called Bobby, then 18 months, and our jobs – Grant was an accountant, I was a physiotherapist – were demanding. Still, despite how hectic life already was, we couldn’t wait to become a family of five.
Of course, that meant we had to make some practical plans too – start saving and move back to West Lothian from Essex to be near our families. After all, we’d need all the help we could get!
But it was just before we moved into a new house when, at a check-up in December, the doctor found that the twins were sharing a placenta, making it a riskier pregnancy. We were monitored closely and I took comfort in the fact that every morning at 3am they’d kick me awake like clockwork.
Only, one morning at 23 weeks, they didn’t.
I remember looking at the clock on my bedside table and feeling a jolt of panic. It was 7.30am. The babies hadn’t kicked all night.
‘Wake up, little puddings!’ I said, rubbing my bump. But there was nothing. ‘I probably just slept through the kicks,’ I told myself, getting ready for work.
Over the next few hours, I drank fizzy drinks and snacked on sweets, hoping the sugar would stir the babies. But although there was some slight twitching, I knew something wasn’t right.
Growing more and more worried, Grant raced me to St John’s Hospital in Livingston and, while he sat with Bobby in the waiting room, I was taken in for a scan.
As the doppler was moved around my stomach I kept waiting, kept hoping for a sound to fill the room – but there was only silence.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the midwife said softly, looking down. ‘There are no heartbeats.’
Finding strength
I could have fallen apart, I wanted to. But Bobby was just outside, so I knew I had to be strong for him.
The midwife explained I’d have to come back the next day to speak to a doctor. And that night, when we got home and put Bobby to bed, Grant and I finally allowed ourselves to cry. As he held me in his arms I clutched my stomach. ‘How can this be happening?’ I sobbed.
The next day, tests confirmed our babies had died at 23 weeks. But we’d have to wait for a post-mortem to find out why. Then the doctor dropped another bombshell. ‘You’ll have to give birth to the twins, Sandie,’ he said. I felt physically sick. After everything that had happened, I couldn’t believe I still had to go through the pain of labour.
Bobby stayed with Grant’s parents while I was admitted to the ward. I was induced that evening and, with Grant by my side, on 9 March 2013 our little girls were born.
They were tiny, but they were perfect. ‘They look like Bobby,’ I wept, as they were wrapped in a blanket and placed in my arms.
‘the babies hadn’t kicked’
We spent a couple of hours with them. But, so blindsided by grief, we didn’t think to take any photos of our babies. And, because the twins hadn’t reached 25 weeks, they weren’t legally registered, which meant even if they’d been born alive there was very little the doctors could have done to help.
The truth was, I just wanted to get back to normal. Remembering was too painful. We didn’t give the girls names at that point and, two weeks later, Grant and I were back at work.
But, no matter how much I wanted the agony to disappear, of course, it didn’t. Every day, I’d pretend things were fine, but my girls consumed my every thought. When the post-mortem results were inconclusive, meaning nobody could explain why they had died, I couldn’t understand how life could have been so unfair.
Six months later I found out I was pregnant again, and I finally confessed how I was feeling. Like me, Grant was terrified. ‘We’re not coping,’ he said. ‘We need help.’
Grant contacted SANDS Lothians, the Stillbirth And Neonatal Death charity, and chief executive Nicola Welsh started speaking to us regularly on the phone. She told us it was OK to talk about our twins, and that we had to grieve in order to move on.
honouring them
We realised that talking about the girls was actually easier than trying to pretend the tragedy had never happened. That Christmas we named them Darcey and Lucy and I bought them Christmas pudding tree decorations. ‘For our little puddings,’ I told Grant.
In May 2014 our son Gordy was born. Bobby, then four, adored his little brother, but it brought back the pain of losing Darcey and Lucy all over again. Then a year later, Nicola told us about the bench she’d had installed in Linlithgow baby cemetery in memory of her son Theo, who’d died at 20 days old.
It was like a light bulb suddenly switched on – we knew that’s what we wanted to honour the girls’ memories.
In September 2015, our beautiful daughter Carly was born. Soon after, we started fundraising. Over the next year we completed a marathon in Amsterdam, shaved our heads, held karaoke nights and ran races. Soon we’d raised the £5,000 for the memorial bench, as well as enough to help out with refurbishments at St John’s Hospital.
I’ll never forget seeing our baby girls’ bench for the first time. It was installed in March 2018, the fifth anniversary of Darcey and Lucy’s birth. Grant had designed two little metal sparrows to sit on top of the bench, engraved with the initials ‘L’ and ‘D’.
As we sat on the bench, the sunshine filling the cemetery, we were too overwhelmed to speak. We just sat there, holding hands, as Bobby, then six, Gordy, three, and Carly, two, played nearby, their laughter filling me with the joy I needed to keep going.
While I hope the bench is a comfort to grieving families, giving them a place to sit and reflect, it’s also a way to keep our girls’ memories alive.
Our little puddings may not have got to see the world, but we’ll make sure the world never forgets them.
‘We’re not coping. We need help’