Alive, Alive Oh! by Diana Athill

Author:Diana Athill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

So if I were pinned down to answer the question, ‘What did you feel on losing your child?’ the only honest reply would be, ‘Nothing.’ Nothing at all, while it was going on. What was happening was so bad – so nearly fatal – that it eclipsed its own significance. And during the four days I spent in hospital I felt very little: no more than a detached acknowledgement that it was sad. Hospital routine closed round me gently, isolating me in that odd, childish world where girls in their early twenties are the ‘grown-ups’, and the exciting events are visiting time and being allowed to get up and walk to the lavatory. When it was time to go home I was afraid that I would hate my bedroom, expecting to have a horror of the blackbird’s song and perhaps of some little rusty stain on the blue carpet, but friends took me home to an accompaniment of flowers, delicacies and cheerful talk, and I saw that it was still a pleasant room, my flat still a lovely place to live.

There was even relief: I would not now have to tell my mother anything, and I would not have to worry about money any more than usual. I could spend some on clothes for my holiday as soon as I liked, and I saw that I would enjoy the clothes and the holiday. It was this that was strange and sad, and made me think so often of how happy I had been while I was expecting the child (not of how unhappy I was now, because I wasn’t). This was what sometimes gave me a dull ache, like a stomach ache but not physical: that someone who didn’t yet exist could have the power to create spring, and could then be gone, and that once he was gone (I had always thought of the child as a boy), he became, because he had never existed, so completely gone: that the only tears shed for him were those first, almost unconscious tears shed by my poor old tortoise of a subconscious rather than by me. ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ Oh, no, no, no, I hadn’t wanted it, it was the thing I didn’t want with all my heart. Yet now it had happened, and I was the same as I had always been . . . except that now I knew – although if I had died during the miscarriage I would hardly, because of my physical state, have noticed it – the truth was that I loved being alive so much that not having died was more important to me by far than losing the child: more important than anything.

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