Between Two Rooms: Fatherhood, Grief, and the Silent Hum

I live between two rooms.

One is fluorescent and busy. Nurses murmur. Pumps count time with a red pulse. My son sleeps, a line taped to his chest, and I count breaths without meaning to. The other is still. A delivery suite where we learned the sentence no parent can hold. We went home with a memory box and a silence that changed the shape of our house.

Most days I walk the corridor between them.

People ask how we’re coping. I say, “We’re managing.” A bridge manages too — it sways, it holds, it carries more weight than it should. I learned to fold feelings small, to speak tidy answers, to sign where the form is blank. That armour worked, until it didn’t.

What the body remembers, Smell is a trapdoor.

Chlorhexidine, pink hospital soap, the hiss of hand sanitiser — and my teenage self is back on the ward. Knowledge should give agency. In a children’s oncology corridor, it also hurts. I know why water tastes metallic after antiemetics. I know the sound an IV makes when it ends — the soft, final sigh. Expertise becomes memory, and memory becomes a weight you carry into every room.

Two sons, two tempos 

Grieving a stillborn son asks for slowness: light a candle, say his name, keep the rituals. Fighting for a child in treatment demands speed: read scans, learn drug names, notice the smallest change in colour or appetite. Slowness and speed tear at each other in one body. The cost is headaches, tight shoulders, anger that slips sideways over nothing. The gain is simple: both boys are held.

Boxes and lids 

People talk about denial like it’s a flaw. In crisis, gentle compartmentalisation is survival. I made a box inside my chest. I put the heavy part of grief in there so I could count drops, ask for pain relief sooner, hold still hands during bloods, and say “I know” in a voice that meant it. The lid rattles in traffic, in the toiletries aisle, at 3 a.m. on a ward chair. When micro-stability arrives, I open it a fraction. A candle. A name. A page.

Grief isn’t a spill to mop up. It’s a landscape to learn.”

Small rules that keep us human 

Don’t fix; listen. Don’t compare pain. Don’t make the other person your weather report.

We fail at these, then start again. Strength looks different now. It’s asking for help with groceries. It’s saying out loud, “I’m scared.” It’s letting tears come in a stairwell, washing your face, and going back to the bed without apologising for being human.

The brother in the doorway 

There’s a quiet front at home. A bedtime story waits while the phone buzzes from the ward. “Stay, Dad.” I want to. Minutes later, I’m under fluorescent light again, steady voice on. This is what the corridor asks: move between worlds without dropping the thread. Hold the child in your arms and the child you carry in memory, in one sentence.

Meeting the day you have 

Healing isn’t the opposite of survival. It’s survival with a longer view. Two millimetres more breath. Twelve seconds of sharp feeling that doesn’t drown you. A list on the fridge. A kind friend who leaves lasagne and a note: no need to reply. Permission is medicine.

I can’t make this neat. I won’t try. I can light a candle, count breaths, say their names — all of them — and keep walking the corridor.