I always knew I wanted a family. Being fiercely logical I never really understood why it was so important for me to have my own children – my own flesh and blood – except for the obvious and perhaps slightly unattractive truth of the primal instinct to leave some genes here after i’m gone.

Rationally – I thought the right thing to do is to adopt. There are children out there who need a loving family; and while they’re there it’s a selfish indulgence to have children of my own. Regardless – we began trying for a baby shortly after we were married.

She had always wanted a family as well. I fondly remember her, on the verge of tears, one hard day at work saying “why am I here!? I just want to be at home covered in babies!”

She became very frustrated after several months of trying, without success, to conceive. She has polycistic ovaries which apparently made it harder to conceive. Her charming impatience was funny and heartbreaking in equal measure.

It was one of those bright summer mornings where the light is bursting through the window and regardless of the days plans one can’t help but wake up serenely. This particular morning as I slowly opened my eyes, head still sunken into the pillow and covers halfway covering my face I saw my wife. She was grinning. She whispered my name excitedly. “I’m pregnant!”

More than anything I was happy that her dream had come true. It didn’t dawn on me properly for months that we were going to have a life-changing baby in the house. Our spare room where I sometimes listened to music and kept my collection of board games – the same one where radio controlled model aircraft hang from the ceiling and walls would be a bedroom for a baby. What a peculiar thought.

The pregnancy was easy. There was a little bleeding; but we didn’t worry because we were told not to. She worked almost right up to the due date, and we didn’t really worry at all. Having a baby would be easy. People had been having babies for millions of years. How hard could it be? No big deal.

Something that is no big deal one day, can seem very different seen in a harder light.

It was winter now and on that January night, the night before he was due to be born, we fought.

She is a committed Christian, and I am an atheist. Practical people that we are; we had covered these topics in incredible detail within weeks of starting to date. The children would go to church with her, but would be allowed to choose for themselves – and I would be free to speak and act with my conscience. Like our marriage – it would work because we knew what to expect.

My wife was knelt on the floor in the sitting room while I wasted time on the internet and she showed my tiny little baby clothes which she packed into small suitcases.

This night I don’t think either of us expected to fight, but for some reason I couldn’t erase this image of my poor son being plunged into a bucket of water in the name of a God I don’t believe in. It was just water, but it seemed so cruel. I’d seen baptisms before and felt this horrible dread on the infant’s behalf moments before seeing them dunked in – and for some reason I brought this up with her. She couldn’t see my side and although I can’t remember what was said, or exactly why – that night I said some things that upset her.

In retrospect these things were probably innocuous. We were tired, emotional, nervous and of course – we had a plan; I didn’t really mind him being baptised, I just wanted to be understood – and of course so did she. We place importance on moments in time, often because of what happened afterwards. Correlation is not causation though and through all my doubts; I know that to be true.

We made up and went to bed. Hours later Audrey began to have light contractions. Something was happening. It was exciting, but Audrey felt something was wrong. The contractions that had been getting stronger quickly tailed off. The hospital, who she had phoned straight away, said not to worry and to come in the next morning.

I don’t know at what point our son died. I have an idea that he may have died that night when the contractions began, but it’s an uneducated guess and we will never know. All we know is that he had died by the time we arrived at the hospital that morning.

I can’t remember what I wore that morning, but I remember wanting to wear something presentable – after all I was meeting a new member of the family for the first time. I grabbed the baby’s car seat – ineptly left in the hallway rather than fitted to the car – and fitted it hastily (but most certainly securely!) in the car, strapped in my wife in and carefully drove to the hospital.

I cursed the NHS and the stupid lack of bloody car parking and dropped my wife off, during which time I became terribly worried that i’d not find a place to park in time and/or that it would all be a false alarm and i’d have to make up time at work. When I finally found a place to park I walked to the maternity block. I walked fast, but not urgently.

I found them, the midwife and my wife, in a room upstairs. They had been waiting for me. Obviously something was not quite right. They couldn’t find our son’s heartbeat. She tried again. My wife’s placenta was reversed in position so it was slightly more difficult to hear the heartbeat – the nerves I imagine the midwife felt I had assumed were the result of her being new, or inept. Time passed and we agreed perhaps the machine was broken. She tried another machine.

Eventually we found ourselves upstairs in a room that is for parents who have had a baby die. We didn’t know this at the time – there was one more test to see what was going on.

We were told that there was a good chance our baby had died and the medical staff left the room to let us absorb the news. We held each other and cried, only to quickly pull ourselves together again to receive the news.

After some time the medical people came back.

They put the weird jelly stuff on my wife’s belly and began to scan. This the last time we would see our son inside his mother’s womb, but the first time we would not see the little flickering of his beating heart, because it had stopped.

A south Asian doctor told us clearly our baby had died. My wife whimpered and I thanked them for their time and effort. They left us to think some more.

My wife grew up in France and her family speak to each other in their native French. I speak a little but am not fluent by any means. I understood the heartbreaking words she said through tears to her mother on the phone “il mort”. It was unreal. All of our plans, all the things we’d been preparing for – little problems we had solutions for (nappies, baby-sized snow suit, car seat, toys, cot – and so on, and so on); all these were now irrelevant. The joy and hope and difficulties to be overcome had all been completely dashed. It was too much for anyone to process, and so I did the only thing I could think of doing and got on with trying to help. I didn’t cry and I suddenly realised that although I had lost my son, I needed to focus on doing everything I could to keep my wife healthy. One thought kept racing round and round – your wife must not die today.

My wife called my mother, and soon we had two would-be grandmothers and one great grandmother, red eyed and smiling through heartbreak fussing over my beautiful and somewhat vacant wife.

Her father visited as well, he didn’t know what to say but was incredibly kind. I remember us both looking out of separate windows discussing the weather. I don’t know whether it seemed relevant at the time, but I remember it now.

After a time it was just the women and me. We had decided to induce the birth as quickly as possible.

Contractions began and she was given codeine, or morphine or some sort of strong pain killer. She cheerily ate a little sandwich which, on account of the drug, she soon threw up. I stood behind her holding her hair and I realised today would be the hardest day of my life so far – and that if I was going to crack it simply must not be today.

I was offered lunch repeatedly and repeatedly declined.

A few weeks prior to the due date we had an all-day antenatal class. I remember remarking, jovially, that we went in confident of how easy parenting would be and left having learnt 101 new ways that your baby will die. One thing we discussed in this class was pain relief – one method of which is an epidural which, as far as I recall, is a paralysing anaesthetic injected into (or around) the spine. This completely numbs the mother from the waist down and is a very effective method of pain relief. However, in rare cases it can cause permanent paralysis and is often responsible for elongated hospital stays, elongated labour and other complications.

The contractions grew stronger and stronger until the pain made my wife frantic. She demanded an epidural. Her mother comforted her and told her she could have one. The midwife helped my wife up so she could be taken into the room where this could happen. That voice hit me again ‘your wife must not die today!’ and although I was perhaps being slightly over-cautious, I am proud that I was able to persuade my wife to stick with morphine

The idea of the morphine pain relief she had was that she could press a button which would give her a dose of morphine when she needed it. The machine only allowed the button to dispense a dose every couple of minutes or so, to avoid overdose – but my lovely girl, in her drugged up state (and utterly convinced her painkillers were having no effect whatsoever) continued to press the button every few seconds, and when tiring of this instructed me and her mother to constantly press the button. This was one of the many little tiny moments of humour that are always there in horrible, horrible situations.

At this point (and possibly at a point significantly before this) the exact chronology of events becomes hazy. But there are several memories which stand out, some of which i’ve “remembered” for the first time recently.

It wasn’t at the time, but objectively – my wife on morphine was very very funny. I mean it was literally the worst day of my life, but I still smile when I remember my beautiful wife standing up and talking with conviction about nothing at all. Her arms gliding through the air like a willow branch in the wind, or a slow motion ballerina. It was incredibly sweet.

I was struck throughout the whole process of labour by the fact that even on the worst, most emotionally and physically annihilating day of her life she still looked properly, unquestionably beautiful.

The room we were in had huge glass windows and must have been on the 4th or 5th floor of a very tall building. What had been a rather pretty morning had turned into a stormy, dark afternoon – and was now a dark winter evening with snow showers. It seemed unbelievable to me that I had been at my wife’s bed side for hours – and yet equally it seemed unbelievable that i’d ever been occupied by anything else.

The contractions had become pretty consistent now. My wife would experience brief but very very painful contractions. These lasted a few seconds, but then would pass – and the pain would go. During various different contractions my wife vomited, ripped her hospital gown off, screamed, and squeezed my hand until it bled. The worst thing that happened – and the only thing that made me almost shed a tear during this part of the day was when my wife through tears and in absolute desperation screamed “what’s the point – he’s dead. Il mort!”. Just typing those words chills me. Our son really was dead.

My wife also began to think that because our boy had died he wouldn’t be able to come out naturally. In the pain she begged the midwife just to pull him out. It was heartbreaking to think that this most precious boy of ours, was now just a body to be pulled out.

Eventually my wife got the hang of pushing, and breathing – and I must admit so did I. We stood together, my arms around her whilst she leaned on the bed. We waited for a contraction and I remember guiding her “Push! Push! Push! Push!”. She would become exhausted and stop, or tell me she couldn’t go on – and I would urgently tell her she had to continue. Eventually we sort of developed a rhythm and we felt that we were making progress. It was another little victory in a day that was a rout.

Time passed, without us noticing, and the midwife got some sort of floodlight which she shined onto my wife’s body. We were close to being able to see our son for the first time.

The midwife asked my wife what she wanted to do with the baby. “Straight in the cot”. She said.

I saw the top of my sons head and had this ghastly, insane, thought that perhaps he had died because he was inside out, he was a monster, he was some sort of human gargoyle and I was about to be confronted with this horror. His head came out. A mop of went dark hair. His body flopped onto the bed. Dead.

I began to cry. I was so proud of my wife. I grabbed her. I told her how well she had done and that the hard part was over. She wanted to know if he really was a boy. I went to see him in his little plastic, transparent cot.

Anything I type to describe him will sound like hyperbole. Anything I type to describe him will be insufficient. My son at the moment is the single most beautiful thing i’ve seen in my life – and he really was a boy, with my wife’s dark hair and something of me in his face. Maybe I just wanted to see it, but he was mine.

My mother who had been there throughout the whole time, who had been amazing and coped better than anyone began to cry. My mother in law and grandmother were crying too. Audrey was happy, but on drugs.

She managed to walk down the hall to a new bed, in a bright room, where they put our boy in a small cot next to her. Something about this moment was wonderful, despite the unspeakable sadness of it all.

I realised at this point, probably about seven or eight PM by now. Maybe later, I hadn’t eaten anything at all, and realised I was beginning to feel physically exhausted. My mother suggested we go and get a little bite to eat. On the walk to the hospital café she phoned my dad. She told him our boy was really beautiful and he, a paragon of still emotion replied with an uncharacteristic “oh, don’t”. I had crossed into a mirror universe, but unlike that episode of Star Trek where Spock has a beard – I could not cross back. The only normal I would ever know again would be a new normal.

I didn’t realised until I bit into it, but I was ravenous, and devoured a bacon roll accordingly.

I told my mum how great she had been. I told her I hated it when I saw my boy flop onto the bed. At the moment it was so clear all life had left him, and this memory stays with me vividly still.

When we arrived back by my wife’s bedside she was in good spirits. A new midwife had come on shift to look after us and she was incredibly sensitive without being overbearing, but also added a wonderful element of normality to the evening. I’ll never forget how she lifted my boy to weigh him, calling him Sausage, and just fussing over how sweet he looked. If there was any doubt, we really did have a little baby – although he would never cry or grow up.

I hazily remember my brother in-law and dad coming along to the hospital. It was really important that my dad saw his grandson, and I’m so glad he was able to. My brother in law took my home to pick some things up for my wife and we arrived back to hospital. Everyone slipped away, and finally we were alone with our son.

I took a couple of photographs but we declined the chance to have hand prints or locks of hair taken. In retrospect I think maybe we should have done this. I was so concerned at the time that these would only serve to remind us of a grizzly and sad day. I know now that as well as being the most horrible day i’ve had, it was also probably the most special – and regardless, I saw my boy for the first time.

We never found out why our baby died, and at this point I was terrified he was a fragile, broken baby. I was scared to touch him, much less pick him up in case he just fell apart, or turned to dust. I remember some time in the middle of the night going over to the mid-wife’s station and asking if it was OK if I held him. They almost laughed (kindly) that I would ask permission to hold my own child. I lifted him up. He was light, and wrapped in a soft white towel.

I held him carefully and stroked his cheek with the back of my finger. My wife and I sat next to each other holding him and smiled, and cried.

I put him back into his cot, which was now humming. The mattress was chilled to keep him cool.

My wife and I had separate beds, but she couldn’t stand to sleep alone and she climbed into my little sofa bed. She was OK, but then began to cry. I heard her say again, and again “mon bebe”. My darling girl. I held her so tight, and I was so proud of how she’d coped. It was about time she allowed herself to crumple a bit,

Only in the morning did I realise that this was the room for parents who had lost babies. Sombre monochrome pictures of babies hands and so forth. A book on a coffee table which bereaved parents had written in. “I hope no-one ever has to write in this book again” someone had written – dated just weeks before.