Birth, Death & The In Between: Maddie’s Story

18 Jun

Imagine this.

You’ve just found out you’re pregnant, and then 4 days later your husband has a catastrophic car crash.

Track forward 9 months, and he’s still in severe condition in the brain injury unit while you birth his daughter in the birth suite at the very same hospital. He later passes away when his baby is 6 weeks old.

This is what happened to Maddie Morris.

We had the honour to document this sacred birth. It was profound — watching Maddie in all her grief, deeply missing her husband, bring life.

Here’s her story.

Anthony Morris.
The name of my late husband.

I have few chances to write that name now in full so it deserves to be its own complete sentence. Anthony’s life halted one Thursday afternoon, a mere four days after we found out we were expecting.

For reasons unknown, Anthony’s car veered ever so slightly into the oncoming lane and collided with a caravan. The car was not extremely damaged, nor was his phone or wallet or really anything else for that matter — except Anthony. He had been impaled into his brain.

The nine months following that Thursday was the synchronised growth of new life and deterioration of Anthony’s. Four days past my due I found myself in labour at Westmead Hospital’s birth unit, and just meters away at the brain injury unit, Anthony was a complete shell of a human.

I can not begin to describe Anthony’s condition at the time of Eloise’s birth. For those nine months he had endured some sort of medicalised torture in hopes of a future. At that point I couldn’t find a ‘good outcome’ — it was either we loose him completely, or we watch on as a 25 year old man ‘lives’ in a near vegetative state.

My labour was chaotic. I thought I would be fine, I am a midwife after all. I thought I was emotionally strong and equipped. In hindsight I was not. I had the support of my sister-in-law who was an angel on earth, but nothing could ground me.

Labour is a mental game. But despite my best efforts, once the contractions truly set in, I went into a complete mode of ‘I can’t do this’. Not in the way I see women do when they reach transition. In a way where it felt like I could not escape. I couldn’t escape the reality of where my husband was, nor could I escape the contractions.

The physical pain met with the mental pain and I remember telling myself to hold on, eventually they’ll have to give me a caesarean and I hoped I would be put to sleep for it, to quiet my mind.

Thankfully our bodies are truly wonderful resilient things. I opted for an epidural. I knew I was hysterical and couldn’t focus or calm down and I was tense and tight, which I know is not a good combination for dilation. It came time to push and after hours of effort came Eloise.

She came in the form of sweet relief and distraction. Finally here, safe and healthy.

For nine months I had focused purely on Anthony and not so much on the little being growing inside. I wouldn’t let myself get too involved, fearing she would be taken from me, as so much had already been. All of a sudden I had my entire heart inside this teeny little newborn. Life felt so fragile.

I wheeled her down that day to the brain injury unit to put her on her dad. Anthony managed to move his only working hand to pat her bottom rhythmically. He could not speak to her and he could not see her. I described her to him, not that he could remember conversations.

The weeks that followed consisted of me juggling caring for Eloise and trying to visit Anthony. I left my precious newborn for 8+ hours at a time. I began visiting him with her, that was truly fucked…if I can be so frank.

Anthony only continued to deteriorate. I would place her on him, propping her into the fold of his arm and against his wheelchair for him, to not even have the energy to move.

I remember being alone with Anthony and Eloise, after one of Anthony’s ‘speech therapy’ sessions that consisted of him asleep, slumped in his wheelchair unable to participate. I was talking to Anthony, telling him about Eloise and how she was growing. But it was like he was already gone, I couldn’t believe our life’s reality.

Fast forward a few weeks, it was an ordinary Sunday. The night before there had been an incredible lightening storm and I watched it from my living room window. I had spent the night on the phone, learning updates of Anthony’s continuous deterioration in the ICU. At 4am came another phone call, they wanted to essentially offer Anthony the highest form of care, beyond life support to filtering his blood outside of his body.

I said the words I had feared would come to fruition for so long… “I think he has had enough, I think this is our out”. Eloise turned six weeks old that Sunday and Anthony died.

Life since has been just that, life.

Anyone who has lost someone would know that despite your world ending everything continues — the seasons keep changing, each one bringing a new wave of grief, babies grow and develop and you change too.

My life looks tremendously different now, Eloise is almost three. She looks just like him, she sleeps like him the car, she’s fierce and has his cheekiness but she doesn’t feel the weight of his absence. For that, I am thankful.

I have since re-partnered and now exist in a strange state of being in love with two men. Any widow will tell you: there is no ‘over it’. I have welcomed a baby boy, Darcy and experienced a natural calm, controlled labour and birth.

We are busy, happy, alive and fiercely motivated to never forget the incredible human Anthony Morris was.

Thank you to The First Hello, for giving me this space and capturing the images of Eloise’s birth. In an alternate universe I would have loved showing them to Anthony once his eyesight healed and he came home.

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