Bereaved mom finds joy with baby twins
Six years after losing her whole family in a car accident, Karen has a second chance with a new man and their pigeon pair
BRINGING a newborn baby home for the first time is always special for a family – a time of tenderness and togetherness heralding the start of a new chapter in life. But for Karen Swanepoel, it was extra special. Her perfect pigeon pair were finally home after spending 25 days in hospital following their premature birth – and with their homecoming, part of the ache in her heart was eased that much more.
“This is why I survived,” she says, gazing down at the tiny face of her son, Reynard, while her husband, André (47), cradles daughter Desiré nearby.
Six years ago Karen (43) lost her entire family – her project engineer husband, Schalk (39), daughter Jeanelle (5) and son Juan (2) – in a head-on collision while they were travelling home to Bloemfontein after a summer holiday in Mossel Bay.
Karen was seriously injured and spent 10 days sedated in hospital, only finding out about the tragedy when she was strong enough to be weaned off the drugs.
“A part of you disappears when a child dies,” she says. “All your future plans for them are suddenly just gone.”
Karen often looks at pictures of her children on Facebook, and on their birthdays imagines what they would have looked like now and how their characters would have developed.
“Christmas and Mother’s Day are always challenging,” Karen says. “And I still have rituals on their birthdays – we bake cupcakes and light candles next to their pictures.
“That was my first life. This is my second life.”
Karen, a dietician, moved to Mossel Bay in the Western Cape – the place where she and her loved ones had their last family holiday together, playing puttputt and frolicking on the beach – to seek healing and build her second life. And she’s done just that with André.
She’s focusing on her life after the accident instead of dwelling on what she had and what could have been.
And now that the twins are here, life is getting better and better. The babies are doing well, Karen says. They had a checkup recently and are gaining weight nicely – Reynard weighs 3,88kg and Desiré 3,34kg.
They take turns being awake, André says, which is great because their parents don’t feel too overwhelmed.
“They really are little miracles,” he says.
KAREN remembers nothing of the accident that claimed her loved ones’ lives on a stretch of the N1 highway between Ventersburg and Winburg in the Free State on 10 January 2012. BY PIETER VAN ZYL
It’s believed the driver of the other car had fallen asleep at the wheel but, apart from Karen, there were no other survivors or witnesses to piece together the puzzle.
Her and Schalk’s many friends prayed for her as she lay in hospital. She took the impact of the collision on her right side, breaking her right cheekbone, right leg and eight ribs.
Once she was well enough she set about picking up the pieces of her life. She left Bloemfontein for Mossel Bay, where her parents live, and started establishing herself as a dietician.
André, newly divorced, had moved from Ceres to George, where his mother lives.
He and Karen met on 14 October 2014 at Stars Restaurant in Mossel Bay. Karen had been waiting at a table for a friend she had a coffee date with.
André was at another table waiting to have coffee before driving back to George, where his debt-recovery business had an office at the time.
He’d been struggling to place his order until Karen showed him the buttons on the table with which to summon the waiters. They started chatting.
“We clicked instantly,” Karen says. She noticed he had the Bible verse Jeremiah 29:11 stuck on his wallet and she had the same one on her Bible cover at home.
A few days later she was in George as a guest speaker at an information day. André called her just before she was due to go back to Mossel Bay.
They met at a restaurant and discovered many more things in common. “At my age I didn’t think I’d meet my soulmate,” says André, who has a 16-year-old son from his first marriage.
They got engaged at Stars on her 40th birthday in April 2015. André had the engagement ring engraved with the date they met and the Hebrew phrase “Ba’al-Perazim” (God has broken through like water). They were married on 19 December 2015.
AT FIRST Karen hadn’t wanted children because she was afraid of losing them but André wanted them so badly she eventually agreed. They struggled for two years to conceive and tried IVF three times “before nature took over”, she says.
André was over the moon when Karen found out she was expecting but she was more cautious.
“I knew the risks involved when you’re over 40,” she says. But things progressed well – and then they discovered they were getting a double blessing.
“It was amazing to see those two heartbeats on the sonar,” she says. “Double hope and grace. But I still couldn’t help worrying it meant there was now twice the risk something could go wrong.”
As the weeks wore on she allowed herself to relax and believe she was “truly blessed”.
At 33 weeks Karen was diagnosed with preeclampsia. Her blood pressure was dangerously high and there was too much protein in her urine – something that could cause all kinds of complications and potentially be fatal for both her and the babies.
Three days later she was admitted to hospital and her doctor used medication to extend the pregnancy to 34 weeks to give the babies’ lungs more time to develop.
“From there everything happened quickly,” Karen tells us.
The twins were born on 14 September via C-section at Mediclinic George and, although both weighed more than 2kg – which is a good weight for twins – their sucking reflex was underdeveloped and they needed help with feeding.
They were discharged on 10 October.
“It’s wonderful that we hit the jackpot with a boy and a girl,” André says.
“My daughter Jeanelle was a real mommy type and would’ve enjoyed the twins,” Karen says. “They would’ve been her living dolls.”
But, she adds, she hopes her story gives hope to others who’ve suffered loss and trauma.
“Because there’s always hope,” she says. “Believe it.”
‘Christmas and Mother’s Days are always challenging’