I raised my sister's triplets after she walked out of the maternity ward — twenty years later she was sitting at their wedding, and my daughters got up and read a letter I had never seen.
I raised my sister's triplets after she walked out of the maternity ward — twenty years later she was sitting at their wedding, and my daughters got up and read a letter I had never seen.
Our parents went when I was fourteen and Renée was ten.
She held onto my arm and said, "Promise you won't go as well."
And I said I promise, and I have thought about that sentence about four thousand times since.
The girls were born on the eleventh of June, 2006.
Renée was twenty. I was thirty-four. I had been at every appointment, I had built the cots, I had done the whole of it with her.
And on the day, she stopped answering her phone.
So did Casey.
At seventeen minutes past five the next morning the hospital rang me.
"Your sister discharged herself about six hours ago. You're down as her emergency contact."
I got there at about six.
Three cots under the window.
And a note on the one nearest the door, in biro, on the back of a leaflet.
***"Three babies will wreck my life. Me and Casey are going. Do what you want."***
I went down onto that floor.
And then one of them got hold of my finger — the whole hand round one finger, the way they do — and that was it. That was the entire decision and it took about four seconds.
Pia, Della and Tess.
People told me I could not do it. I did it.
No holidays. I did not go to two weddings and a funeral. I never had anybody else, not because anybody stopped me, but because by about 2009 I had a family and did not have room to build a second one.
And somewhere in there I stopped being their uncle.
Renée never sent a card. Not one birthday in twenty years. Not when Della had meningitis in 2011. Nothing.
And then Della met Arlo Dunphy, and Pia met his brother Rafe, and Tess met Sonny.
Three girls. Three brothers. One wedding, on the twelfth of September this year, which was their idea and which I would have paid for twice over.
I walked all three of them up that aisle. One at a time. It took about eleven minutes and it is the best eleven minutes of my life.
And then I sat down and saw my sister four rows back with a handkerchief.
I went over to her at about half eight.
"What are you doing here?"
And she said: "Dean, you don't understand—"
And then the microphone went, and my three girls were on the stage.
"This toast is for our dad. The man who chose us and never once made us feel like we were somebody else's job."
And the room went up, and I had to look at the ceiling.
And then Della said: "And to our mum. Who left twenty years ago. And who is in this room tonight."
And it went completely quiet.
And Tess said: "We found her in April. And what she told us has changed everything."
And she took a yellowed envelope out from under her flowers.
"Dear Dean. If you're reading this then everything you think you know is wrong…"
What actually happened on the twelfth of June, 2006.
My sister had postpartum psychosis.
It is rare — one or two in a thousand births. It comes on fast, usually within hours or days. It is a medical emergency and it is treatable and the overwhelming majority of women recover completely.
I did not know any of that on the twelfth of June, 2006, and I did not know any of it on the eleventh of September, 2026, and that is twenty years and three months.
She was not well by about two in the morning.
She discharged herself at about eleven. A twenty-year-old woman walked off a maternity ward at eleven o'clock at night and nobody stopped her, and I am not going to write anything about that ward because I was not there and it was 2006 and they were short.
And the note is real. She wrote it.
That is the part I have had to take in whole, because for twenty years that piece of paper was the foundation of everything.
My sister wrote that note in the middle of an acute psychiatric emergency, about four hours after giving birth to three babies, at the age of twenty.
And I built two decades on it.
Casey Munn left on the fourteenth. That part of the note turned out to be the only accurate thing in it, and it was accurate two days early.
She was picked up by police on the evening of the fourteenth and admitted on the fifteenth.
Fourteen weeks.
She came out in the September of 2006.
And in the second week — the twenty-eighth of June, when she was starting to come back — she wrote me a letter and gave it to a nurse to post.
And I had moved.
On the seventeenth of June I moved out of the flat into a two-bedroom place on Corran Street, because you cannot have three babies in a studio.
Eleven days before she wrote it.
It went to an address I had left, and it came back to the unit undelivered, and a nurse gave it back to my sister.
And she has had it for twenty years.
What it says.
I have it in front of me. It is one side of A4 and the handwriting gets steadier as it goes down the page, which is a thing I did not notice for about a week and now cannot stop seeing.
***"Dear Dean.***
***If you're holding this then everything you think you know is wrong and I don't know how to start it.***
***I didn't leave them. I don't remember leaving. I remember the room and then I remember being in a police car on the 14th and I've lost the bit in between.***
***They've told me what it is and they've told me it happens to people and I don't believe them yet but they keep saying it.***
***Casey has gone. He went on the third day. That's the only true thing in the note I left.***
***I'm not asking you for them. You should have them and I know that. I'm asking for one thing.***
***Tell them one day that I was ill. Not that I didn't want them.***
***That's all. R."***
***"Tell them I was ill. Not that I didn't want them."***
And I never got that letter.
And I told them the other thing.
For twenty years.
Not cruelly. I never called her names in front of them. I said: your mum couldn't cope and she left, and that is not about you, and I am here.
Which is a decent version. And it is exactly the sentence she was asking me not to say.
Why she never came again.
She came once.
June of 2007. My front door on Corran Street.
And I remember it completely. I have never forgotten it and I have never felt bad about it.
She said: "Dean, can I talk to you."
And I said no.
And she said please.
And I said: "You had your chance. Don't come back."
And she didn't.
And that letter was in her coat pocket.
She has told the girls she should have pushed past me. They have told her she was twenty-one and eight months out of a psychiatric unit and was not in any state to push past anybody, and they are right and she does not believe them.
How they found her.
Tess is doing nursing.
In the February she had a lecture — second year, ninety-odd people in a theatre — on perinatal mental health.
And forty minutes in, a woman at the front described postpartum psychosis.
And my daughter sat in that lecture theatre and recognised her own life.
She came home that weekend and asked me one question. "Dad — did Mum ever see a doctor after?"
And I said I didn't know.
And that is the most shameful sentence I have ever said in my life, and I did not know it at the time.
It took her eleven weeks. A records request, a woman at the health board who went beyond what she had to, and one phone call in April.
She did it on her own and told her sisters in the May and they told me nothing until the twelfth of September, and I have decided not to be angry about that, because I know exactly why.
They needed me to hear it in a room where I could not leave.
What I did.
I went outside.
I stood in a hotel car park for about forty minutes with a piece of paper.
And nobody came to get me, which was the right decision and which was Pia's.
And then I went back in and I did not hug my sister.
I sat down next to her and I said one thing, which is: "I turned you away in 2007."
And she said: "I know."
And we sat there for a while and then the band started.
Where it is.
Renée is fifty. She has been in their lives since April.
She is not in mine, exactly. We are in the same rooms now — Christmas, a birthday in the November — and it is hard work and it takes about an hour before either of us is any use.
I am not going to pretend we have got somewhere. Eight months is eight months.
And what I have had to take.
It is not that I was angry. I was entitled to be angry in 2006 and I would be again.
It is that I never checked.
Twenty years.
I had a twenty-year-old sister who walked off a maternity ward at eleven at night four hours after giving birth to triplets, and I never rang a hospital, never asked a doctor one question, never looked up a single thing.
Because I had a note.
And the note was complete. It had a reason in it and a decision and a name, and it explained everything, and once you have an explanation that works you stop looking.
I had three newborns and no sleep and I took the first answer I was given and then I defended it for two decades.
And the last thing.
Tess has got the letter.
She asked for it in the October and her sisters said yes straight away, and Renée said yes, and I said yes, and it took about four minutes.
She is going into perinatal mental health.
She had decided that by about the March, before she found her mother, which I want in, because everybody assumes it was the other way round.
And she said one thing about it, in my kitchen, in the November, with her coat still on.
She said: "Nobody's getting one of those returned to sender on my ward."
That is what I have got out of twenty years and a note on the back of a leaflet.
Three girls, three brothers, and one of mine who is going to spend forty years standing in the exact spot where this went wrong, making sure it does not go wrong the same way for somebody else.
She is twenty. She worked it out in a lecture theatre in February and had it fixed by April.
May you like
It took her eleven weeks.
It took me twenty years and I only got there because she carried me.
