By Sarah Groves
We played “Pass the Parcel” in the garden, my sister, my husband and I. The present
was my 19 month old daughter, Anna, wrapped in pink but turning blue then purple.
She had been sitting on my lap at the lunch table when suddenly she grabbed my
shoulders, shook her head and “hoohoooed”. Annie is prone to joking. She can rival
Rowan Atkinson for funny faces. So by the time I was certain that she wasn’t laughing,
she had already stopped breathing. Eyes white, face like an unconscious Buddha, we
passed her. Hoping one of us would know what to do. Hoping one of us knew a
Heimlich manoeuvre that the others hadn’t yet tried.
My husband screamed, “Don’t leave us Annie, don’t leave us.” As though she was
being thoroughly disobedient. And I thought: “This is what its like when your child dies.
They drop through a hole, suddenly, and then life goes on in a deformed way. “
We broke the game to rush for the car. Her body hung on my arm. Dead, I thought. But
then she was breathing. And as she sat on me again her eyeballs flickered. I began to
sing: “Lovely pop a dooo pop, Annie pop a dooo pop.” While my husband flashed
lights with one hand, hooted with the other and signalled to cars with the third. We
entered the car park like James Bond. Stand arounders scattered. I fled down the
hallways and swing doors, delivering Anna up with a burst, to the safe world of green
sheets and white towels.
Their plain faces and slow feet were so reassuring: “A febrile convulsion, high fever,
admit her.”
Now Anna lies in the bed next to me, snoring and muttering, as though nothing has
changed. But I am making all sorts of promises: “I’ll never snap at her again, I’ll stop
rushing and start playing more, I’ll always be grateful for her company.”
I know that in one week scar tissue will have grown over this panic. And life will resume
on the surface of this dead skin – broken promises and all. But still, something has
changed. Something there is that wasn’t there before. Is it that I’ve moved into a new
subset of people? The ones who realise that the gap between life and death is a turn of
the page, one step, a few seconds. The grandfather who watched his granddaughter
going blue, arms at his side, remembering his own baby’s last sigh. The grandmother
who came to see me red-eyed. The father who couldn’t get his 6 year old son to
hospital in time as he laughed and choked on an apple. The old lady in the emergency
room who gave me a pained thumbs up as I covered Annie’s chest with a wet towel.
“There can be nothing worse”, my dad explained slowly and softly. I know.
I almost know.
