Finny in The Times (12.2024)

Just before Christmas 2024, The Saturday Times was kind enough to publish an article I wrote about Finny - find it here. It was received with kindness by all, and we were able to raise over £20,000 for University College London Hospitals Charity (UCLH), for which we remain grateful. While this fundraiser remains active for the moment, we are presently raising money for a different charity - Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC UK) who are doing some fantastic work - link here. __

I’ve always loved Christmas. Memories of my draughty, tinsel-clad childhood home in Middlesbrough remain bathed in a schmaltzy glow. My lovely wife Lizi and I met in freshers week at university back at the start of the millennium, and have spent decades forging our own traditions which we folded into our Christmas story. My WhatsApp profile photo, unchanged since 2015, is a snap of the Ikea spruce we brought back to London after living abroad, plastic and straggly, but part of the family firmament ever since.

Then came three Christmases that belonged to Finny, our only child, who arrived in August 2021. He was more than a month early and weighed just over 1kg. His first December was a blur of sleepless nights, tiny elf outfits and beaming smiles. By his second Christmas, he was still smaller than the turkey.

Last year we had a ball with him, skittering around the streets of north London on his new red bike, all shrieks and toothy smiles. He was becoming a dab hand at cooking with his mummy, taking on quality control duties as chocolate taster in chief, and the promise of the magical moments in years to come — leaving mince pies for Santa, school Nativity plays, decorating the tree together, Christmas Eve pyjamas — stretched out before us.

But this wasn’t to be. In July this year Finny woke up one morning complaining of a tummy ache. It didn’t go away, and the GP suggested A&E. We entered the Whittington Hospital in north London later that afternoon. The ensuing farrago was the stuff of nightmares. Finny clung to me for nine hours as we sat on chairs in filthy corridors, with key examinations being conducted on my knee. We were sent home around 1am and told to come back the next day.

When we woke, Finny wasn’t breathing. I tried and failed to resuscitate him on his little yellow playmat. Then came the ambulances, the police and their own failed attempts, before he was taken back to the Whittington, where he died — exactly one month before his third birthday.

In the ensuing days, the hospital excelled itself in exacerbating our suffering. Their response to the collapse of our world comprised a leaflet and a baffled silence when we asked for more. Weeks later an autopsy found Finny died of what amounts to a twisted bowel; a clinical answer that explains everything and nothing.

On returning home without Finny, the silence was visceral and absolute. No scampering feet, no shrieking laugh, no cars whizzing on the fake wood floor, no Hey Duggee on the TV, and nothing to do. The shattering of routines is grief’s pragmatic challenge, an hour-by-hour reckoning.

Grief is a lonely pursuit. Surrounded as you are by family flailing around and making vat after vat of lasagne, and bombarded by dozens of WhatsApps — “if you need anything…” they uselessly bleat — you are quite alone in your own personalised pit of horror, navigating the daily challenge of answering: “How are you?”

Lizi and I were transformed from the most revoltingly happy of families to zombified broken people as we drifted through friends’ empty houses in the summer, desperate for a distraction from the encompassing pain.

We reached out to various grief groups for bereaved parents immediately. Fairly astonishingly, they wouldn’t let us come to any in-person meetings for at least three months. If you make it that long, the sentiment seemed to be, pop along then.

Having bleakly survived, we attend monthly meetings and sit in church halls clutching tepid tea, each taking turns to unspool our catastrophe. The veterans do it with a brutal fluency born of years of repetition, while we newer members stutter and gasp through our narratives, still raw in the telling.

There are no answers here. Still, moments of connection catch in the throat. When one father described feeling “eternally flat”, he might as well have been reading from my unwritten diary. But the rough is never far from the smooth. “Grief gets easier after seven or eight years,” opined another father gravely. Not exactly what I was hoping for.

Inevitably the draw to solipsism returns, often quickly. His child died as a teenager: what I’d give for another decade with my little one. Her child died pre-term: at least she never knew the sweetness I lost. I make these cruel distinctions, these absurd calculations of loss, trying to honour my little one by placing his death beyond comparison. Like the People’s Front of Judea squabbling with the Judean People’s Front, this factional impulse is both irresistible and futile. Such grief accounting serves no one.

The raw tragedy I can somehow accept — that my little smiler who swept up at nursery, who would serenade me singing that I was his “best friend” (admittedly after intensive tuition), is gone. But this turns out in some ways not to be the hardest part. The true challenge becomes accepting that there is no resolution to this intolerable situation. Rather, I just need to live with Finny’s bedroom door firmly closed, every day walking past the road to nursery and the school he would have gone to, seeing his little friends becoming less and less little.

Within weeks, we took up cold water swimming. Some tout its quasi-scientific benefits — something about the vagus nerve. I remain sceptical. For me, it’s simpler. I don’t have nursery drop-offs any more, but I do have something equally regular, inconvenient and expensive (I’m a great fan of neoprene) that forces me out of bed.

Moreover, when bobbing around Hackney’s West Reservoir — I hesitate to call my method of propulsion “swimming”, lest that give you the wrong impression — the only thing to focus on is the shattering cold deep in my nether regions and a tiny, psychological pat on the back that I’m up, out, and doing a passable job of faking being someone with purpose and meaning.

I returned to work at King’s College London at the start of September, driven by an abiding fear of spending too much time in Finny’s home. In meetings and classrooms, I’m flatter than before, but managing a passable impression of normality — a Middle East scholar who has unwillingly become an expert in a different field: catastrophic grief. But whenever I need to engage directly with thoughts of Finny, such as at meetings with other bereaved parents, I dissolve. I remain unable to look at photos or videos of him.

The siren’s song of having another child is profoundly conflicting. I yearn for the cuddles, the kisses, the pure exchange of love. But having Finny’s echo, inescapable and immediate in baby and toddler demands, could wreck the sad, flat equilibrium we have cobbled together in recent months. Were it to happen, I would fight with everything I had to give another child an upbringing free of the damage losing Finny has bequeathed. I just hope I’d have the strength to rise to the challenge.

Now, the first Christmas without Finny looms large. My run of joyous times in December is judderingly over; the Ikea spruce is not up this year. That is sad, but manageable. What’s impossible to face is everything Finny has lost: all those Christmases that should have been his. Christmas was distilled joy and happiness, but it feels a betrayal of Finny’s memory to ever truly enjoy anything again.

To all of you blessed with unabridged Christmas joy, I wish you nothing but the happiest of times. And here’s my gift to you — the secret of what bereaved parents yearn for. We long for you to ask about our children. What are your favourite festive memories? Which traditions made them bounce with excitement? Yes, this is sad. But every bereaved parent I’ve yet met aches to talk about their child; to weave stories of golden yesterdays into today’s paler light, and speak about our kids, however briefly, as if they were still here.

This year, we are hiding away, off to a friend’s empty house in Somerset. No family, no decorations, far fewer pigs in blankets. If I am a wreck on the 25th, a blubbering, seething, wrenching mess of snotty grief, then so be it. But I won’t let this ghost of Christmas potential haunt my daily thoughts.

Instead, I am swapping revelry for silence — no carol-singing, no Christmas gatherings. Here, I join a great many people who similarly struggle to engage with the festivities. To my fellow non-Christmassers — those who used to partake, or who still wish they could but cannot — I offer no empty cheer, no clichéd bromides. Whatever distances you from Christmas cannot be solved, answered, or improved by a phrase or two, however well meant.

All I will say is that it might not be as bad as you imagine, it will be here sooner than you realise, and then gone again just as quickly. Remember many of us are finding our own ways to hide.

Finally, in keeping with this season of well-meant but ultimately empty gestures, know that I’ll be out there too, bobbing around some body of freezing water, thinking of you as we deal with this most unbearably joyless of hitherto joyful days.