Keith, there’s something wrong with Jordan. Words that will forever remain in my mind. I was going for a shower, we sere getting ready to go to a friend’s Tech graduation. I looked at the clock and thought it was weird that he wasn’t up. He had been up at 5am and was always up every 3 hours on the dot. It was not 9.30am.
I looked into the bassinet and found my sweet little baby with a purple face. I had to look twice to see if I wasn’t dreaming. Unfortunately I wasn’t. I gave Jordan to my husband Keith who started to give him CPR while I called an ambulance. That ambulance seemed to take forever, when they really took only ten minutes. I kept looking at Jordan and saying “please don’t be dead Jordan, please don’t be dead”.
They spent 10 minutes trying to resuscitate Jordan with no luck. The one in charge came back in and said that he didn’t think Jordan was going to make it.
I then made the hardest phone call of all. I rang my parents who lived 15 minutes away, and told them what had happened. They arrived straight away. The police arrived and asked me a lot of questions. I was in so much shock I wasn’t thinking straight. One of the policeman was horrified and all he could think of was the same thing happening to his children.
The rest of the day seems a blur, I remember organising what we wanted for the funeral, making phone calls, organising clothes that they could put on Jordan after the autopsy, and watching the funeral director’s car drive off.
We got him back the next day and had him at home until the funeral. It was nice to pick him up when I wanted to, and for friends and family to come and say good-bye. The day he was born (2 ½ weeks earlier) we had had a conservatory built onto our property and we put him in there with all the beautiful flowers we received.
We found that the film had not been put in the camera properly, so we had no photos of when Jordan was alive, but my sister Janine, took some beautiful ones of my sleeping baby the day we got him back. I think it must have been one of the hardest things for her to do, and I really admire her for being able to do it. Two weeks ago I found a baby scan that had the year of 1993 on it, turning it on my video I realised it must have been Jordan’s.
The day of the funeral came and we had a naming ceremony for him. My friend Janine held Jordan which was beautiful. During the funeral it was wonderful to see so many friends turn up. I wished it could have been a joyful occasion that we had got together for instead of such a sad one. Friends mentioned to me later, that at the gravesite they had been worried that I would not be able to put Jordan in his coffin. Looking back at it, I can’t figure out how I did it either.
Getting on with my life afterwards seemed impossible. I got a job as a teacher aide at a primary school but had to leave the room whenever a baby was present as it upset me. (I later found out the may father changed the channels on the TV whenever a baby came on for the same reason.)
I got pregnant two months later and had another little boy, in September, whom we named Kingsley. I felt all right about him for about 3 days without a monitor, until I started panicking about it happening again. At night he was put in the nurse’s station until I got an Apneoa monitor. He had a lot of false alarms and then it almost happened again, the monitor went off, I went and checked him and he wasn’t breathing. He was rushed down to SCBU (Special Care Baby Unit) and had a whole lot of horrible (but unfortunately necessary) tests done on him that turned up nothing.
Red Nose Day 1994 and I decided to stop moping around and do something positive. My husband Keith and I went to a meeting with the Auckland SIDS group where I met many supportive people. We organised Red Nose day in Manukau and Papatoetoe and with others decided to start up a support group in South Auckland.
It’s taken me a long time to go through a day where I won’t feel guilty about not thinking about Jordan, where I won’t feel guilty about saying I’ve got two children and then saying that one of my children died, while watching people feeling guilty for asking.
I’d like to say to those bereaved parents and others touched by cot death that the hurt and pain does diminish in time. Don’t expect to recover at anyone else’s pace.
Jordon Anthony Michael Todd-Wakefieldv *18/10/93 – 05/11/93 Loved son of Keith and Andrea Wakefield Loved grandson of Bruce and Gail Todd
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