As a cop I knew all about death… but the grief was new
Police officer Clare Mackintosh trained herself to be strong in the face of tragedy. Then she lost one of her premature twins. Now the devastating experience has inspired a poignant meditation on life and loss
GROWING up, I had a more comfortable relationship with death than most people. My father was a pathologist who was both candid and interesting about the work he did. He would occasionally take me into work, where I would look through his microscope at cells, smeared between glass slides, and tell me about his findings from the day’s post-mortems.
When I joined the police force at 23, I asked if he’d take me to work again. The college schedule included a group visit to a mortuary and I didn’t want my first glimpse of death to be such a public one. As my father slid out each drawer, he told me what had brought the person inside to the morgue. A heart attack .A fire. A car crash.
As we reached the next occupant, his hand stilled on the drawer. A child, he told me.You don’t have to look if you don’t want to. But I was steeling myself to be the best police officer I could be, so we opened the drawer.
Just briefly. Just enough for me to know that I would be strong enough to cope, should I ever encounter a situation in which a child had passed away. I never imagined that, one day, the child would be mine.
Pregnancy did not come easily. Doctors advised that our likelihood of conceiving naturally was less than one per cent, so we saved for fertility treatment and were overjoyed when our first cycle resulted in a twin pregnancy.
I was placed on light duties in the safety of the police station, where I planned to remain until a fortnight before my due date.
Fate had other plans and my waters broke unexpectedly when I was 26 weeks pregnant. I was admitted to hospital and given drugs to strengthen the babies’ lungs.
Two weeks later – three months ahead of schedule – Josh and Alex arrived and were whisked off to neonatal intensive care. As any NICU parent will know, having premature babies is a difficult journey, but both our boys made remarkable progress. After a brief time on a ventilator, Josh moved to an incubator next to Alex and I installed myself on a plastic chair equidistant between the two. Each day I left home at 6am and got home at 10pm, and each day my babies grew stronger and stronger. The doctors began talking cautiously about when we might bring them home, where a double buggy was folded at the bottom of the stairs and two cots waited patiently in the freshly painted nursery. Overnight, everything changed. We arrived at NICU to find Alex had been moved to a side room. He’d picked up a hospital bug, we were told, which had caused an infection.
Over the coming days, the infection worsened.The doctors stopped talking about when the boys would come home and instead spoke of infection markers and blood transfusions.As Josh graduated to the high dependency unit, Alex was being placed on a ventilator in intensive care.
The following week was a living nightmare. Alex had contracted meningitis, we learned, which had caused a bleed on his brain.
HIS LUNGS were filling up with liquid which had to be suctioned on the hour, and he had started having seizures. When Alex was five weeks old, we took the decision to remove him from intensive care and let him die.
Death, I knew about. Grief, though...grief was new. Every part of me screamed with pain, as though I’d been hurled from the top of a tower block, yet somehow, miraculously lived to tell the tale.
I remember the ensuing weeks only in a series of disconnected images, with no memory of how I moved from one to the other. Leaving the hospital. Calling my parents.
‘Every part of me screamed with pain as though I’d been hurled from the top of a tower block’
Alex’s funeral. My husband Rob was given compassionate leave and together we stumbled through our grief.
The majority of people, I discovered, do not handle death well.
They find it an uncomfortable subject to talk about, instead dishing out platitudes so they can move on as quickly as possible.
“At least you still have his brother,” people were fond of saying, as though children were dispensable. Others fell back on the trite, “He’s gone to a better place”, or “At least he’s no longer suffering”, and my fingers would curl into fists.
I didn’t want platitudes. I wanted someone to listen. To acknowledge my pain. To say: “Yes, this is an unspeakable tragedy. I can’t imagine how much it hurts.”
A few weeks after Alex died, a woman came to the door with a bunch of daffodils picked from her garden.
We didn’t know each other, but she had heard what had happened and as her own child had died many years previously, felt compelled to reach out. “I promise it won’t always hurt like this,” she said. I didn’t believe her. I was barely sleeping. I couldn’t stand the sound of silence when night fell, opting instead for a low background hum of the shopping channel as I tossed and turned.
My chest was tight; my limbs were clumsy; something was permanently lodged in my throat. When I tried to speak, the words dissolved into tears. I was broken.
“Yes,” said the woman, when I told her this. “But you will mend.”
I’m almost too ashamed to admit what was in my head at that moment.
I thought: “You can’t have loved your child the way I loved mine.”
It was an irrational, unfair thought, but grief is often irrational and unfair. Grief is not soft-focus tears and crisp white handkerchiefs – it is ugly, raw, swollen-eyed sobs. Grief is desperate rages and smashed plates and why did this have to happen to us?
The years that followed were full of changes. I fell suddenly pregnant (something that should have been impossible) and 15 months after Josh and Alex arrived, I gave birth to a second set of twins, Evie and George.
I left the police and wrote a crime novel that sold a million copies (something that seemed equally impossible), propelling me into a brand new career. We moved from Oxfordshire to a small town in Wales.
But there was one constant during this time. Grief. It impacted everything I did, making me view everything through a filter of what-ifs and if-onlys.
I tried hard to live in the moment, but grief pulls us into the past when we least expect it. A perfume, a poem, a piece of music; ripping off the bandage and exposing our wounds again.
We do not “get better” from grief, but we do learn to live with it.
I focused on putting one foot in front of the other and on taking one breath after another, until one day I realised I wasn’t having to think about it any more. Slowly, carefully
I– and with almost as many backward steps as forward ones – I began to heal. On the 14th anniversary of my son’s death, the day was already unfolding before I remembered its significance. I had forgotten.
I hadn’t woken up that morning with fresh grief in my heart and, although the realisation came tinged with guilt, it made me consider how far I’d travelled.
‘I recalled the promise made to me by the woman who brought daffodils and felt a need to pay it forwards’
WASN’T merely surviving, I was living, in a way that for a long time I hadn’t thought possible. I remembered the promise made to me by the woman who brought me daffodils and I felt a visceral need to pay it forwards.
I have written seven bestselling novels, but writing I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This was an entirely different undertaking.
I wanted to be completely honest with readers, but honesty isn’t always comfortable and there were times when I had to drag the words out of me.
Writing required me to unpack emotions I realised I had never truly confronted, but in doing so, I found a new level of peace.
Whenever I write a book, my ambition is that it finds its way to as many readers as possible.
This time, my aspirations are more specific. I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This is the book I needed when I was first bereaved. It’s the book I wish I’d been given instead of platitudes.
My hope now is that it finds its way to the people who need it most.
●I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere, £18.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25