Introducing Craig

Hi,

This is my first post here on Freyja and Kees. As an introduction, I'm Mirne's husband. Our life was going along swimmingly, nothing could possibly go wrong, we were the happiest people we knew (so happy, I think some people thought we were a bit over the top sometimes).....

Well, our life went bad. In July 2006, just 4 months after we were married, our baby girl died. She was stillborn at 28 weeks. For those who don't know, that means my wife had to give birth to a fully formed baby and I had to hold her hand while she did it. It was the most traumatic thing I had ever done (up to that point). We didn't know what to do with ourselves. We hung around our families in Adelaide for a few weeks, then went back to our home in Melbourne.

About this time one of my sister-in-laws decided to tell my wife that she had never really liked me. This is after having been my "friend" for about 15 years, attending the same church, and working at the same hospital for a time. During the last year I had had lunch and dinner with her at work (depending on shifts), had dinner at her house numerous times, and she had even spent considerable time telling Mirne (my wife) that she really should stick with me as I was a great guy. And now she can't stand me, and never could! Neither of us knows where this came from, and I don't really care. We don't have any contact with her any more, despite having held out an olive branch for a year and only being slapped back every time.

We went away for about 4 months, traveling and making happy memories for ourselves. It sort of worked, because we are both able to look back on that time as a time of growth in our relationship. We spent a lot of time talking and getting to know each others feelings. I have never been so close to anyone as I am to my wife, and I think few people ever get this close to anyone - I put it down to this time. I know everything about her, and she knows everything about me.

During our travels an old colleague of Mirne got in touch, and she had a job interview while we were in the Netherlands. She didn't accept it at first, as we were both unsure about what we wanted to do. In the end we went to Amsterdam, where we are now. After we had been here for just over 10 months we had a living baby, a boy. He was beautiful. Unfortunately, when he was just 7 weeks old he died. I had been in the habit of feeding him in the morning at about 6, and if he didn't go straight back to sleep (about 50% of the time) I would bring him down to the lounge room and we would play. That morning I brought him down after feeding and changed his nappy. Then it was my turn to pee, and I left him for about 2 minutes while I went 2 metres away to do so. When I came back he was the wrong colour (I know the colour of death well, from my work) an I could se he wasn't breathing. I felt for a pulse, and when I didn't find one I started CPR. Welcome to the second time I was in the most traumatic time of my life. This one lasted for just over 2 days. An ambulance arrived, and they took over resuscitation. Unfortunately, they could not establish an airway for over 45 minutes, and even though his heart started to beat again he never breathed without the aid of machinery again. The next day they did an EEG, and determined that there was no brain activity. We were waiting for family to come from Australia to see him before his life support was switched off. At 12.20pm on Friday 21 March 2008 he was placed on my chest and his life support terminated. Mirne was lying next to me, and we were both holding our baby boy. About 20 minutes later a nurse informed us that his heart had stopped beating some time ago and he was now dead.

We went home, and prepared to take our son back to Australia to be buried next to his sister. During this time I asked my mother if I could have the memory card from her camera so that I could get copies of the photos she had taken at the hospital. Imagine my surprise when I came across a photo of my sister playing in the snow outside the hospital! I immediately confronted them with this, and was told first that it hadn't happened, then that I couldn't possibly have seen a photo as there wasn't one, then that it wasn't when and where I thought it was. Of course, we recognised the hospital, having been there every couple of weeks for the previous 10 months and of course it was when they were leaving after he had died because the photo has a time stamp (as do all digital photos). My sister never apologised, and in fact she extended her stay in Amsterdam by 2 days because she had never been to Europe before and she wanted to enjoy it. WTF!?!?!?

I telephoned her 2 days before the funeral, back in Australia, to give her an opportunity to apologise. She didn't, and actually hung up on me telling me not to be so mean to her as she was suffering too. I rang her back and left a message on her answering machine telling her that she and her family were not welcome at the funeral unless she was willing to admit that what she had done was wrong and to say she was sorry. My father decided that this was an inappropriate thing for me to do, and told me so. At the funeral both my father and mother walked right past us at the door (apparently because they didn't feel they should stand in a line to hug us, as all the other mourners were doing) and when I went to greet them at the back my mother hugged me but my father turned his back on me! I found out that day that my parents really do have only enough love for the child who can produce living grandchildren, and that's not me. Since then my relationship with my family has been non-existent. We have received 4 or 5 emails, and no phone calls. For our 40th birthdays later that same year we received a card, sent 3 weeks after the date (we are born one day apart, in the same year).

I have given up on my parental family, and now concentrate on the only family I truly have - Mirne and me. Maybe there will be an addition at a later date, but neither of us really believes that a third pregnancy would result in a living child.