`How many children have you?" That should be an easy question to answer. Unless one of them is dead, yet living within you still. How do you answer the question then, without betraying your dead child? Do you smile and say the expected: "I have two children, thanks, a son and a daughter"? Or do you risk challenging - even offending - your listener with the difficult truth: "I have three children, a son, a second son who died at the age of one day, and a daughter."
Poet Peter Fallon, who with his wife, Jean Barry, lost a day-old son, John, on December 8th, 1990, still isn't sure what to do in these situations. "I don't know if there's a day that goes by that I don't think about the baby and I suspect the same is true of Jean," he says.
The loss of a child can be too painful for words, but you can try. In a new anthology, A Part Of Ourselves: Laments For Lives That Ended Too Soon, 43 Irish writers attempt to speak the unspeakable. Most powerful are the agonising accounts of the deaths of writers' own children - through illness, cot death, miscarriage and the contributions on the theme of an inability to conceive. Others contribute pieces about the loss of children based on the experiences of family and friends, or simply as imagined within the creative process.
Among the writers are Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, Patsy McGarry, Mary Morrissy and Nuala O'Faolain. Published to mark the 21st anniversary of the Irish Sudden Infant Death Association, all the book's royalties will go to the ISIDA. Its editor, Siobhan Parkinson, who herself had a still-born son, chose the book's title from Peter Fallon's poem, "A Part Of Ourselves", which he wrote in an attempt to come to terms with the death of John, the couple's second child, who was born with Edward's Syndrome, a rare and devastating birth defect caused by an extra 18th chromosome. He writes:
"In a hospital corridor/ I held him in my arms. I held him tight./ His mother and I, we held our breath - / and he held his"
Seven years later Peter says that although John's death was appalling, "it could have been much worse". Peter and Jean at least had a warning through a scan before the birth. They did not lose a child at the age of several months or years - a child they had truly known. And through it all they were able to communicate and strengthen their relationship.
Yet to this day he grieves. "There are those moments in the ordinary day-to-day which are difficult. It is not easy to think about it or talk about it. My life has two parts - before John and after John. My parents died and that was in order. This wasn't."
Years ago before John was even conceived, Peter saw a headstone at Loughcrew which said "Henry Timson, born and died September 2nd, 1899". For Peter at that time the death of children was a remote experience belonging to Victorian graveyards. Losing a child, he admits now, was in the category of things that happened to other people, and he thought: "How could you walk away and leave your child in the ground?"
Little did he know, that some day he and his wife would be forcing themselves to walk away from such a grave, leaving a part of themselves behind them - "the innocent part", as Peter describes it in his poem. "I miss my baby," he remembers Jean crying, "as an amputee laments a phantom limb."
From all over women began to approach the couple with their own experiences of loss through unwanted pregnancies, abortion and miscarriage and Peter realised that the death of children is far from being remote: such grief is everywhere. Because the couple's first-born child, Adam, was only three when he lost his brother no one knew how much he understood the loss.
Two years later, however, the shadow which follows Adam was revealed when Peter brought him, aged five, to hospital to meet his new sister, Alice. As father and son were leaving hospital, Adam looked up and asked: "Will she be there in morning?"
Today Peter remembers his response . "Yes, she'll be there . . . finally, it had been spoken and at last I could begin to reassure him." Siobhan Parkinson lost her son six years ago when he was stillborn as a result of anencephaly. At the time her first-born and only child, Matthew, was six .
"He was absolutely devastated and for years afterwards would burst into tears at the thought that his only brother had died. In some way that helped me to cope with it - talking him through it and letting him cry and me crying with him."
She adds that when Matthew was asked in school how many brothers and sisters he had, he said: "I have a brother, but he died". He didn't want to say: "I have none."
Siobhan is the author of eight children's books, including Sisters No Way, winner of last year's Bisto award for children's literature . It was the death of her own baby son which led her to a personal renewal and, ultimately, a writing career. She wrote her first book - All Shining In The Spring because there was nothing on the shelves for children who had lost siblings. Similarly A Part Of Ourselves is her attempt to help grieving parents find a connection with others who have had the experience.
"The book seeks to give a voice to that largely unarticulated and unacknowledged grief," she says.
"It brings a message to families that are bereaved in this way and the message is not one of hope or one of consolation or one of damage-limitation. The message is very simple: you are not alone."
Siobhan was seven months pregnant when a scan revealed that her baby had anencephaly. She would have to carry the child to term, even though the infant was likely to die at the moment of birth. At first Siobhan was horrified at the prospect of letting the pregnancy take its natural course. In the end, however, she was grateful for the two months of preparation for what was to be her child's still-birth at full-term.
"It was wonderful to know that I had done all that I could for this baby. He lived his natural lifespan. He was not for this world and that helped me to let go," she says.
"When you go through an experience like this, you think of how it could have been so much worse. To lose a healthy child would be dreadful."
This was the experience of poet and archaeologist, Mairead Carew, who has two poems in the anthology. Mairead lost her seven-month-old daughter, Orflaith, through cot death on January 2nd of last year (1996). Her documentary about cot death, Angels in Heaven, was broadcast on RTE earlier this year. Since Orflaith died, Mairead has given birth to a daughter, Aoife, now four months old. "It's frightening because sometimes she looks like Orflaith. Orflaith was just like her, big and healthy and happy to eat. There was no medical explanation. No reason at all. It's terrifying. You have a bouncy, happy baby today and tomorrow she's gone," says Mairead. Like Peter and Siobhan, Mairead has seen her eldest child, Fiach (5) coming to terms with death. "Never a day goes by that he doesn't mention her," she says . One day the four living members of the family, new baby in tow, were going to the cinema and Fiach wondered aloud if they would have to buy five tickets, including one for Orflaith, but then he decided: "We'll only get four because the man in the cinema can't see Orflaith."
Fiach constantly watches Aoife for fear that she too might die and with his growing understanding come new questions about death. "He doesn't let anybody forget it. It may be upsetting but I prefer him to talk openly about her," Mairead says.
For Mairead too, Orflaith is a constant emotional presence: "Everything reminds me of her. She's always with me all the time and everywhere. If it's raining she is in the raindrops. If the garden is bathed in sunlight, then I feel she's there somewhere."
To bring these dead - yet present - children into our consciousness and our hearts is a great achievement for every writer who has contributed to a A Part of Our- selves. Anna Farmar, the anthology's publisher, lost a daughter to leukaemia and wrote in her own book, Children's Last Days: "Parents do not `get over' the death of their child . . . Although the intensity of the mourning eventually diminishes with time, bereaved parents have continually to work at accepting and living with loss."
A Part Of Ourselves will help grieving parents with this challenge and will help others to understand what they are going through.