Little Indiana heals broken hearts

 

Happy arrival ... Glenn and Kylie Hall nurse their baby Indiana / Pic: Suzanne Lowe Source: The Daily Telegraph

 

GLENN Hall reached down and lifted baby Lachlan from his wife.

With tears trickling down his cheek, he hugged his boy, his first-born child, and told him how much he loved him.
He kissed him on the forehead and said: "I love you Lachlan. I am proud to be your dad."
The NRL player gently placed his little boy in a blue tub. He washed away all the birth, all the muck, as he held back his hurt, anger and shock.
Summoning courage beyond belief, Hall gave his stillborn son his first bath, washing him, drying him and dressing him.
And then he said goodbye.
"It didn't matter that he was still-born," Hall said.
"He was my little boy and I wanted to do all those things for him. I wanted to show him how much I loved him.

"It was so hard to do but I had to do it for him. I wanted to be a dad and that was my job."
A tragedy only those who have lost children could ever understand, Lachlan died while he was still in his mother's womb about three hours before his birth.
Kylie, Hall's brave and remarkable wife, pushed little Lachlan from her body, knowing she would never get to know the little boy she had been carrying for the past nine months.
Hall, a Manly player at the time, was in Melbourne preparing to play the Storm in the first finals match of season 2009 when he was given the news that would see him collapse into his teammates' arms.
"We were just about to go to our final session before the Melbourne semi-final," Hall said.
"Kylie was at a breastfeeding class and had had some pains. She went in to get it checked and was told the baby didn't have a heartbeat. I was in a video session and she couldn't get me on the phone. She called my trainer and he came in and got me. He said, 'you have to ring your wife'.
"I called thinking it was go time. I was so excited. But she just said there were some problems and they couldn't find the baby's heartbeat. That the baby is gone."
Hall walked through the lobby of the hotel trying to hold himself together. He didn't know how to tell his teammates.
"I went down the lift and began walking across the lobby but I collapsed. I think it was Glenn Stewart and Anthony Watmough that picked me up," he said. "They didn't know what was going on and I was a mess, shaking and crying. Dezzy [Manly coach Des Hasler] came over and I muttered it out. I told them my baby had died.
"He pushed the boys on to the bus and sat down with me for a while. Then he got me straight on a plane so I could be with Kylie."
Hall rushed to hospital but missed the birth. His baby was lying in his wife's arms when he arrived.
"I will never ever get over it but I wanted to welcome him into the world just as we had planned. Even though we never got to take him home, we had a very special nine months with him," he said.
"We were so pumped to have him. When Kylie fell pregnant, I grabbed the little stick from the pregnancy test and put it in an envelope so I could show it to my mum. I chatted constantly to him while he was in Kylie's belly. The last thing I said to him was, 'don't come this weekend. I have a big game to play'.
Glenn and Kylie drew strength from the tragedy.
With their family and friends by their side, they buried little Lachlan and celebrated his short life.
"We had created something special," Hall said. "We had the best nine months with him. We felt so lucky to have had that time with him. I used to sit there and talk to him every night. We were desperate to be parents and we were during that time. We know we did nothing wrong and it wasn't our fault.
"There is nothing we could have done differently. We didn't try to swallow it and hide it away. We talked about it all the time and don't run away from it. The pain will never leave. It never eases but we have him here with us. We have his ashes here with us now and we also keep little things around the house which are a constant reminder of him."
It was this extraordinary attitude and love that gave Glenn and Kylie the strength to try again.
"I shat myself when I found out," Glenn said.
"Kylie snuck off and did the test in the middle of the night and screamed out in joy when she saw the result. I woke up with her screaming and I almost had a heart attack. I was so happy when I worked out what had happened. I ran around the house jumping around saying 'yes'.
"We didn't have any fears the second time around because we knew there was nothing that we could have done last time to avoid it. We approached the pregnancy the same way as we did with Lachlan.
"We did everything the same and treated it as another blessing. It obviously sits in the back of your head, but it is out of your hands. If it wasn't to be, well it wasn't to be."
But it was to be. Last week Hall, now playing with the Cowboys after a one-year stint in England with the Bradford Bulls, helped deliver his second child, a beautiful, healthy girl the couple named Indiana.
Again Hall bathed his baby, washed off the birth before slipping her into a little jumpsuit.
And then he cried.
"They were tears of joy. She is the most beautiful thing in the world. I did all the same things with her that I did with Lachlan but this time I got to take her home," he said.
Nothing can or ever will replace Lachlan; Glenn and Kylie's love for their boy is everlasting.
Indiana will never know her big brother but with the strength of her parents she will be hearing about him every day.

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