Christina's fourth child, Pax, was stillborn at 26 weeks gestation in July 2000. She wrote the following piece and read it out at his funeral.

Beloved Pax,

You will never know how madly you are loved and how sadly lost. Just seeing the words on the paper is hard. I should be caressing my warm belly now bursting with you, not writing these words to be rolled up inside an urn with you, our darling boy, in ashes.

The clock stopped the day you died lad. It is summer still, though the leaves are falling and the days growing darker. Though you are gone you are with me all the time Pax.

I can still feel the brush of your limp cold lips against my tear-stained cheek. I can still hear the dull thud as you slid through me raw and bloodied. I can hear too the deafening silence of your coming and see your eyes still sealed against the harshness of this world. You were too good for it, for us, I try to tell myself. But still I yearn for you over and over.

My arms ache to hold you, my lips to kiss you, my eyes to devour you in their gaze. You the child I will never hold, whose lips will not suckle, teeth never grow. You are the silent child, the one who will never wake me but for whom I lie awake and long for night after night without end.

I will never change your nappy or watch you as you take your first tentative steps. I will never shed tears the day you start school.

But I will always remember you Pax. No one, nothing can take that away from me. You will always be there, my fourth child, my darling lost little man.

You died in me but you live in me too forever, beloved Pax.

Christina