‘We like to think we’d be the heroes’: Mitch Jennings’ frank account of personal loss and love

Devastating loss in an area few people understand or talk about led Mitch Jennings to the realisation that people don’t always respond to life’s challenges the way we might hope.

Everyone has that song, the one that makes them cry no matter what. I probably don’t strike people as a huge Beyonce fan, but ‘Blue’ is that song for me. It’s the song my wife used to sing to our first two children. Children we never met.

We began trying to start a family at around the same time I began writing what would become my debut novelA Town Called Treachery. One of two protagonists in the novel is an 11-year-old boy named Matthew who never knew his mother given she passed in mysterious circumstances not long after he was born.

As I had never experienced grief of that kind, it was a purely narrative device. I had no idea how profoundly I would come to understand it by the time I finished that manuscript.

Common as it is, pregnancy loss remains a taboo topic. People just don’t have a vocabulary for it, particularly men. My wife and I learned as much through the loss of multiple pregnancies.

‘We like to think we’d be the heroes’ ... Australian author Mitch Jennings. Photo: Sylvia Liber.

Like Matthew’s vague recollections of his mother in my novel, it’s a memory that exists only as pain, near impossible to bear but equally hard to let go of. It is all you have of what you lost.

It cannot be understood without experiencing it. It’s why people who haven’t had that experience say absurd things like ‘it’ll happen when it’s meant to’ or ‘at least you know you can get pregnant’.

It continued through the subsequent failure to conceive and purgatory of IVF cycles, though I was spared the physical pain my wife endured (I remain in awe of her).

We’d all hope to be the best version of ourselves in such circumstances, but you just never know until it happens to you.

What if it happened to me? Is a question that drives crime fiction, where murder, violence, shame, secrets and lies push ordinary people to their extremes. Out on that ledge, we’re left to wonder what our flaws and vulnerabilities could leave us exposed to; what could happen to us, or worse, what we might do to others.

We like to think we’d be the heroes, but what’s more striking is the traits we share with the bad guys, the ones not ghoulishly evil, but fashioned by common human experience.

‘Writing the novel was my way of facing up to questions’ … A Town Called Treachery.

When I put pen to paper on this novel, I’d have thought I possessed the emotional capacity to deal with the pain of miscarriage. I was wrong.

I became closed off, locked up, unable or unwilling to address the pain. I turned to alcohol instead. No drink was safe within arms’ reach of me. Getting hammered to full-volume Cold Chisel ballads at 2am was my therapy of choice.

Even as the pregnancy that ultimately resulted in the birth of our son Harvey in June this year progressed to the ‘safe’ stage, I sank deeper into that hole. That fact shattered the biggest misconception people hold when it comes to miscarriage: that subsequent children you may be blessed with wash away the pain of pregnancies lost.

It was amid that personal reckoning that Matthew’s sad alcoholic father Robbie came to life on the page … and I realised how much we had in common. He was not me as I was, but who I was vulnerable to being, a man I could not allow myself to become.

Writing the novel was my way of facing up to questions I’d long asked of myself – what kind of dad will I be? Am I up to it? Is the fact it took so long the universe’s way of telling me that I’m not?

‘It still makes me cry’ … Mitch Jennings. Photo: Sylvia Liber.

They’re questions I’m yet to answer, but there’s something poetic in the fact Harvey arrived in the world just a month before that novel was published. I don’t think either could or would have happened without the other.

The preceding years left me convinced that life isn’t fair. I still believe that. If life was fair, the unconditional love of a child you hold is something you would have to earn. Instead, it’s a gift.

Pondering that thought, I hear my wife in the other room singing to our boy. Blue, by Beyonce. It still makes me cry. Always will.

A Town Called Treachery by Mitch Jennings is available now, published by HarperCollins. Share your stories at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.

Originally published as ‘We like to think we’d be the heroes’: Mitch Jennings’ frank account of personal loss and love