‘The Need to Render Ourselves Comforted’ by Rebecca Goss

Let me tell you about fucking when you’re sad. Let me tell you how it starts, how it is possible to let yourself be touched when your body has become numb to many things. Let me tell you how necessary it is. Those first few nights, after stepping away from my daughter’s lifeless body in intensive care, were fitful. I woke early to the bewilderment of her absence. Yet it was only weeks afterwards that the secret dark of my marital bed became a way to communicate. A way for my husband and I to convey we were unhappy and afraid, but present. That we had lost her, but not each other.

It never felt wrong. To fuck after her death. It never felt disrespectful. I never felt my mourning meant I had to shut my body down entirely. We were standing at the edge of a black pool, with no idea of its depth, our bodies resigned to the submergence, a slow fall into its waters and we had to keep hold of each other as we went under. Maybe fucking was an alternative to drowning. It was my sister who asked me, weeks after the funeral, if I had had sex since my daughter died. I loved my sister more furiously in that moment. My sister who stood fully clothed in my empty bath days after her little niece’s death, scrubbing my bathroom wall tiles, all her sadness and anger transfigured to a ceramic gleam. She was not shy in her questioning. She asked me with real hope in her voice. Cross-legged on my bed, phone in my hand, I was able to tell her that I had. I heard relief in her breathing. As if I had proved my husband and I might endure this catastrophic loss.

In the months she lived, all my physical energies were saved for my daughter. All my caresses were for her alone. I do not apologize for my stunted desire. My body was striving to keep her alive and nobody else deserved my touch. The fucking happened because after she died, my husband and I mourned her, but finally understood that we mourned each other. All those respective night shifts on the ward, taking it in turns to sleep by her cot; to pull out the camp bed, smooth its green blankets, preparing for her night-cough and the counting of her breaths. Sometimes we left notes, to be found on the pillow. A list of everything she had eaten, a longer list of what she had not. The recording of her oxygen saturation levels, the particular storybook that had lifted her that day. Because, you see, there was no time to talk in the car park. No time to be held or soothed. I took the car keys and drove home to walk the dog, find clean clothes, go through the post, as my husband hurried to the relentless flicker of her bedside machines. This is how a marriage functioned in the presence of a terminally ill child.

After her death we found ourselves beside each other again and I wanted to be near my husband all the time. I did not know how the grief might present itself if I was alone. Wanting to reduce the sheer effort of dressing, I wore his shirts. It was easy to push my arms into striped sleeves, let the cotton settle on my back, but I needed to feel them, oversized, on my weary frame. As we sat and planned her funeral, I needed to be closer to him than ever before. As a grieving mother, my look was changing. In hospital, I would head to the parents’ bathroom each day, return to the cardiac ward showered, dressed, makeup at my lips. This was nothing to do with a fixation on my appearance, a silly vanity playing out in the most surreal of settings. It was all to do with control. I had to look like I was dealing with the direction my life had taken. I did not want the terror of my daughter’s diagnosis to manifest itself in unkempt hair and unwashed clothes. I refused to look defeated. When the ward round began its swarm towards each patient, I changed my daughter into a new, clean babygrow and stood beside her metal cot, ready. Do you not see how well I am coping, doctor? Do you not see how well I am managing your dreadful news? But after she died, I pulled the hair back from my bare face, took to wearing the ponytail from my youth, my adult life now stripped of responsibility. She was gone. I needed someone to hold me. And because my sadness prevented me from expressing how much I loved him, I slipped my body inside my husband’s shirts, I reached for him at night.

Compared to the stretch of a childless day, night is a different space to steer. My dreams became her playground. She came out from hiding to sit amongst toys, open her books, her hair wispy and blonde. I would bend to pick her up, re-feel that familiar mass, the insufficiency of her size held close against my chest. We would tour downstairs rooms, greet the dog in his basket, her damaged heart beating with delight and my expanse of sleep would be full of her. But pre-sleep, I granted myself a reprieve from her image. Lying beside my husband, I let the all-consuming nature of my grief be momentarily suspended. Fucking was a fervent, short-lived suspension of the hurt. Still mute, still unable to articulate how unhappy I was, the pain of her death became offset by another intense physical sensation. In the sheer heat and sweat of it, our stricken bodies were able to offer shelter, solace. It was never angry. We weren’t fucking because we were maddened by the loss. It wasn’t about fucking and choosing not to grieve. It was about letting ourselves discover the intimacy of grief. That fierce unspeakable pain translated into physical touch. Fucking meant permitting ourselves to be open and exposed, whereas the rest of the time so much was buried. I cried in the car, parked in back streets, where no one could see me. My husband distracted himself with long working hours. Daylight saw the execution of effort. The effort of dressing and eating and shopping and watching other people conduct the ordinary lives we wanted. Night became liberating. A space that was absolutely ours, a space to concede the suffering.

And afterwards came sleep. Not always, but often. Because fucking left us so blissfully tired. Like the widower I once heard on the radio, who spoke of the evenings friends dragged him to a salsa club floor to move his bereft, insomniac body awkwardly, then, without resistance until his limbs were beading with sweat and he was delivered back home, exhausted, to where sleep could not evade him anymore. Fucking was like that. No matter that it did not last forever. That there would be nights in the future when the grief would become cloud-like; settling, dense and white, in front of me. I would not see through it or past it, and my husband would not be able to pierce it. He too would be lost; breathing his own cold sorrow. But in those immediate weeks and months, we grew closer, because only we knew what it felt like to live with her gone.

The physical dynamic between us changed when my husband was not ready to have another child, and I was. I became resentful of the small, white pill I swallowed every morning whilst he wanted me to keep taking it. Our next child could not be conjured by my longing alone. Everything had become complicated by fear. We knew about percentages. The chances of having another baby with her condition were higher, and that knowledge was carried to our bed. Suddenly, the freedom we had experienced was gone. Fucking was no longer about escape, or a way to communicate without speaking, or even a confirmation of the love. It became about anticipation and risk. Making our second child required us to shun any doubt and be hopeful. We had to desire each other, despite what we knew. We never spoke of the possibility of it happening, because a new child felt so unfathomable a prospect. Our home was still scattered with our daughter’s presence. Just to try for another child, felt momentous enough. I was tremulous when we started; simultaneously scared and eager. In the end, I gave in to the thrill of it, lying beside my husband’s naked body, breathless, trying not to listen to the quaking of my heart.

My belly swelled. I like my body pregnant. It is the only time I have ever liked my body, when it is pregnant. Stripped of the weight that women scrutinize themselves for, my post-morning sickness body was tall and lean with the tightest of bumps. I swam almost daily. I was fit, strong and confident. Any destructive body-shame vanished from under our sheets; the baby causing a positive current instead. The fucking was amplified by this spark. We had made a baby, lost a baby, made a baby again. Once all the numerous, necessary scans revealed a foetus whose heart was undamaged we let ourselves be full of tender, urgent hope.

We ate out, we went to bars, we went to the cinema, we lapped up a city’s convivial offerings. We flirted and danced and led each other to bed where my changing shape only intensified the intimacy between us. My husband has never been the type of expectant father to hover above the roundness of my pregnant stomach. He has never stroked my taut skin or leaned his lips close to sing or whisper to the babe within it. We have laughed at the very thought of him conducting such gestures. But I can recall the physical affection we gave each other in those febrile months. How heady it was to be so loved and desired and to feel so certain.

When the time came, we drove to the same hospital, and walked into a similar looking delivery room. I was transported back to the previous birth and all the trauma that awaited me there. A midwife, aware of my history, sat beside me on the bed, her voice full of reassurance. She helped turn my sadness into effort; my body into industry. I shunned painkillers but held on to the gas and air with a monstrous grip. Vaguely aware of my husband talking to the midwife, I thrashed below them both as if unobserved. I shouted and roared and stripped off my clothes and I’m still not sure if it was really like this, but then a sudden rush of slippery limbs, my vernixed imp expelled. How I cherished her angry cry. The midwife left the room, perhaps gracing us more time alone than others. My husband and I used that time to create an intimacy I will not forget. For six hours, we stayed in that delivery room, its door closed, a new world happening within it. My husband wondered this child, cradled in his arms, as I lay on the bed, my body tired and tingling. We found ourselves overwhelmed by both the past loss and the current joy. We spoke our dead daughter’s name and searched for her likeness in the creases of a newborn face. We let our new baby’s name feel astonishing on our lips.

‘She is of course just an ordinary miracle,’ wrote Laurie Lee of his newborn child. We carried our own small miracle out of the hospital and followed the river home, stepping across the threshold and up the stairs, to a bedroom waiting to be filled with her gentle breaths. That large white room became a sanctuary. The trees outside its wide bay window afforded me a secrecy in the daytime; I could feed my baby with the curtains open. Being upstairs no visitor ever strayed there. It was somewhere my baby and I had to our absolute selves. There was space to scatter her toys on the floor, the dog joined us on the bed. I piled the duvet with books and would spend hours reading, her fists pawing at my chest, her little determined sucks audible as I turned each page. I kept the Moses basket tight against my side of the bed, so my reach for her in the dark was only seconds long. My husband shared this space and I became aware of the effort it took to love two people with an equal intensity. My focus was my child and I immersed myself in what was required to keep her alive. Some weeks my husband and I struggled to find each other in that blurry haze of sleeplessness and tending. This tiny being, capable of such invasion. Our adult privacy lost to a crying baby. But my husband and I remained beside each other at night. No one moved to a different bedroom. No one took a pillow and a blanket to sleep on their own. And on the days when I found myself abandoned by joy to feel grief creeping back into the room, its toxic breath on my cheek, its dangerous hover at her crib’s edge, my husband climbed into bed to lie near me. My body absorbed the reassuring heat of his presence.

I have come to admire us. Our marriage survived the death of a child and we prove this by being visibly complete. My husband and I still live together, we still manage the demands of daily life, we can be seen walking our second child to school. Over twenty-six years we have fought, and we have wept. We have endured job loss, and financial struggles. We have borne the death of a parent; we have rescued a dog. We have held our babies in the dawn of delivery rooms, and we have scattered one child’s ashes at sea. We are still married. But the survival of that marriage meant retaining the ability to long for each other, and I admire what we did. That despite the horror of losing our daughter my husband was able to hold my body, even though my body still yearned the heat of hers. That he was able to trace his fingers across the breasts I fed her with. That I took his fingers in my mouth, the same fingers that held her small body as she died. Both of us, so damaged by that mystifying loss, yet still capable of desire; the sweetest folding of ourselves into dark.

From issue #12: autumn/winter 2021

About the Author
Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. She is the author of three collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing and the 2015 Portico Prize for Literature. Twitter: @gosspoems