‘PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY’

Elle wright, 33, is a blogger and writer. She lives in Surrey with husband nico, 32. Their son Teddy was born in may 2016, but died just a few days afterwards. You know babies die, but you don’t think it will ever happen to you. Teddy lived for three days and he was in a neonatal intensive care unit all that time.

I’d had a normal pregnancy and labour and Teddy was born at 6.45pm, full-term at 39 weeks three days. He was utterly perfect.

After his birth, we went to the ward, but at about 2am I was woken by a midwife telling me she had to take Teddy as he was really cold, and she disappeared with him. I remember his little arm flopping by his side.

We let him go

He was put on a ventilator and, the next day, was transferred to a neonatal intensive care unit at a different hospital.

They ran every test but couldn’t identify what was wrong – later we found out he had a very rare metabolic disorder which made him, as the doctors worded it, ‘non-life compatible’.

On day three, they said that Teddy had no function in his brain and the ventilator was doing all of the work. We had to let him go.

That night, we dressed him in a romper suit and hat and I read him a bedtime story, Guess How Much I Love You, as he slipped away. And then we came home without him.

In the early days I just felt numb. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be someone pushing a pram. I could feel a physical ache in my chest that didn’t go for months.

It was weeks before I could bring myself to talk to anyone outside my family about what happened. The first was my best friend, who called me the day after we got home. She was the only person I could bear to speak to.

I would dread seeing people, thinking, did they already know? If not, should I tell them? What do you say? Often those who do know don’t know what to say.

Writing a blog has helped – and the number of people now who contact me telling me things like their parents went through it 35 years ago and still feel the pain of it, but felt they couldn’t talk about it, is extraordinary.

Two years on, Nico and I talk about Teddy every day. We did conceive again four months after Teddy died, but we lost that baby, too, at 15 weeks. We still have Teddy’s nursery ready for his younger sibling, our ‘take home’ baby. ✱ Elle’s blog can be found at featheringtheemptynest.co.uk; her book, Ask Me His Name (£10.49, Lagom) will be published on 20 September.

‘HE WAS PERFECT’