As the small, black positive sign began to appear on the screen of the pregnancy test, Amy and I grew more excited, holding the test stick together with a shared sense of its preciousness. Amy and I had been together since we were teenagers. Now, aged 30, the timing felt right. We couldn’t wait to be a family.
At the gender scan, the sonographer said we were expecting a baby girl. We named her Elowen. It means elm tree in Cornish. As our baby grew, our lives clicked into place more and more. Our home in the New Forest was finally finished after months of renovation, making it just right for Elowen. And our business – a hostel in the mountains of North Wales – was running smoothly, with us managing it from afar.Â
The world felt bright and complete, like the warm months leading up to Elowen’s summer birth. She would always kick and dance every morning.
That was Elowen’s rhythm, and we learned it by heart.
But on that Monday morning, 24 July 2017, two days before her due date, there were no kicks, no nudges.
William Henry Searle opens up about losing his baby daughter and navigating grief. Pictured with his wife and their son Eli in 2021
I leaned over the bed and called out her name, ‘Elowen, Elowen, Elowen.’ We thought she was perhaps too far down to hear us. Amy prodded and pressed her belly.
I brought her a glass of cold water and a bowl of sugary cereal. Still no movement. We decided to go to the hospital; our bag was already packed in anticipation. Maybe this was it, the day we would meet our daughter and bring her home. But as we reached the motorway, we both descended into silence. Amy gazed at her bump, cradling it in her hands. I put on some music to try to rouse our child. No response, flutter or kick. I gripped the steering wheel. I felt sick.
In the maternity day assessment unit, a midwife strapped Amy to a CTG machine and searched for a heartbeat – searched and searched. We were then taken to another room. It was dimly lit, with one bed and a computer screen. Amy lay on the bed and I squeezed her hand. The screen loaded. The sonographer moved the device over the contours of Amy’s belly, again and again. Then she stopped and secured it on a plastic hook beside the screen. She turned to us, took a breath, and said, pronouncing each word slowly, ‘I’m sorry, but your baby has died.’
Our world ended there and then.
Amy was given a pill to induce her labour, then we were sent home. I can barely recall those next few days except for when Amy sang Elowen’s song to her in the shower, holding her belly with both arms, weeping. We covered all the mirrors in the house as Amy didn’t want to see herself, her pregnant belly sagging from the weight of our dead daughter. We held on to one another, not wanting to let go. We kept hoping that the hospital had made a mistake.
After a long, agonising labour, Elowen was born in our local hospital at 1.35am on 27 July 2017. We were terrified of seeing her, worried that she might have been disfigured or wounded in some way, so a screen was put up during Amy’s final contractions.
I watched her finally fall asleep at 4am, pale and exhausted. I wept into a pillow until dawn.
We didn’t see Elowen until the following evening; she was in her cot, wondrous and new. I had never seen such perfect beauty. I laughed through my tears at her chubby little hands, the wrinkles on her fingers, the fingernails.
I ran my finger across every feature of her delicate face.
On the day of Elowen’s cremation, we held our own ceremony. It was too much for us to attend. The image of watching her coffin slide away into concealed flames would have killed us. Instead, on a blustery August morning, we sat beneath a special oak tree we called Elowen’s Oak. We made a small pile of sticks that protected a few lit candles from the wind.
Her ashes were brought to us a day later inside a teddy bear that we held on to as though our lives depended on it. But where was our child? Where was Elowen?
I was terrified that Amy and I would drift apart in our grief. She felt like a failure as a mother and I felt helpless. We wanted to die and in death go to find our Elowen.
After a long, agonising labour, Elowen was born in the local hospital at 1.35am on 27 July 2017. Stock image used
OUR PARENT HEART WAS AWAKENED. WE NEEDED TO KNOW WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO HOLD A WARM, LIVING CHILD
I often found myself daydreaming about ways I could die. We needed help.
Finally, we got in touch with a counsellor named Bren who we saw almost every week for a year. We ignored the outmoded ways that grief was once understood – in ‘stages’, or ‘moving on’. I didn’t want to deny the pain in some herculean effort to try to block Elowen from my heart. No, I needed to live through the pain because it brought me closer to her. And we could only face the storm together, not alone. It was up to us, as her mum and dad, to keep Elowen alive in the world somehow.
Amy and I stayed close to one another. We walked daily on the heath and ate together. I needed her. We travelled abroad too, taking time away from our home, in which Elowen’s stark absence was becoming increasingly difficult to live with. The silence of her nursery, her clothes that were never worn, the garden she never got to play in. Just as Amy felt phantom kicks in her belly, I heard the phantom cries and shrieks of our baby girl. One night I even jumped out of bed to go to check on Elowen.
We talked about whether we should try for another child. Not to fill Elowen’s absence, but to save that sense of us as a family from disappearing. In Elowen, our parent heart was awakened and it stayed awake. We also needed to know what it felt like to hold a warm, living child.
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On 10 October 2018, Eli, our son, was born by emergency caesarean. It felt miraculous. Yet I felt guilty, too, that Elowen didn’t get to this point – and about all the things that Eli would have; all the adventures I had planned with Elowen that Eli was going to experience instead.
But his life soon shone with its own light. And we moved house, too. A change that seemed daunting yet necessary to ensure that we remained intact as a family, with Elowen firmly in her place among us.
Now we live in a remote valley in North Cornwall and Eli will be five next month. In the darkness after losing Elowen, I could never have imagined that we would make it this far. I am so proud. And I never take a moment with my son for granted. He is my world.
To those people who don’t know us, it looks as though we only have one child. But we have two: Eli and Elowen. It’s just that Elowen is felt in the heart rather than seen with the eyes.
Elowen: A Story of Grief and Love by William Henry Searle is published by Little Toller Books, £18*
*TO ORDER A COPY FOR £15.30 UNTIL 17 SEPTEMBER, GO TO MAILSHOP.CO.UK/BOOKS OR CALL 020 3176 2937. FREE UK DELIVERY ON ORDERS OVER £25. GETTY IMAGES
