One month on

This seems to have been the longest month of my life. Hours and days have elongated yet the weeks have passed quickly. How can one whole month have passed already since Monty was born?

It's hard to describe how I feel. I mourn the intimacy of maternal love for the baby growing inside and the lost potential of a life that never came to be. I am exhausted from lack of sleep and the effort required to get through each day. I feel incredibly sad and burdened by the thought that I have let everybody down.

The chaplain told me that it is perfectly normal for mothers to feel it is their fault when a baby dies. I have replayed over and over in my head the hours between my last midwife appointment and the scan at the hospital, looking for a missed signal that would have told me something was so terribly wrong. I feel I have failed as a mother in not being able to save my son, although medical advisors have said that, in all likelihood, no action on my part would or could have changed the outcome.

We are waiting for the results of the tests carried out postnatally on me and Monty and the results of the post mortem. We will be called back to the hospital to meet one of the consultants to go through all the results but have been told that, in the majority of cases, they are unable to determine the cause of death. It is important for us to understand if there was an identifiable reason for the loss of our baby and to consider the possibility of maybe trying for another child at some point in the future.

The world continues about its business but my life has been turned inside out. Plans, hopes and dreams have been shattered - the rug has been pulled from under my feet. I have never before felt so uncertain about my future. In a practical sense, we can continue where we left off but I know there will always be something missing and the unspoken, unanswered question - what if? When people ask me how I'm doing, my first answer is usually "OK" but friends who probe deeper and ask the right questions soon find out that I'm bewildered, confused, cast adrift, tearful...

Someone said to me "It's as if your life is a beautiful glass vase on a windowsill. One day, when the window is open, a breeze blows your vase onto the floor and it smashes into pieces. You collect up as many pieces as you can find but even if you try to glue them back together, there will be some pieces missing and it will never look the same again. So, melt the glass and make a new vase which, although different to the first one, can be equally beautiful."