The reality star, 26, bravely admits she contemplated taking her own life after Consy's death and felt abandoned by boyfriend Tom, 28, who dealt with his grief by shutting down completely
EVERY evening, Malin Andersson curls up in her bed cuddling a soft fabric doll. The nights are long but the doll brings her much-needed comfort.
It belonged to her baby girl Consy, lying next to her in the incubator for the four weeks she spent fighting for her life and until the day she died.
“It still smells of her,” says Malin. “I don’t mind being reminded. I need to talk about her and remember her. I can feel her all around me.”
It’s only 10 weeks since Consy died, and Malin’s grief is raw. Born on December 23 by emergency Caesarean nearly two months early after a heart defect was detected at 33 weeks, Consy was too small – just 4lb 8oz – to be operated on, but clung on for a month, Malin a constant by her side.
“I’ll always remember her beautiful, big brown eyes,” she says. “They had such a story to tell. I feel like she was an old soul and she knew she wasn’t going to be here for long. I know she came to teach me something and I’m sure whatever that is will unfold.”
Malin, 26, would be more than entitled to feel furious at the astonishingly cruel hand life has dealt her. Her dad Rune died of cancer before she was one, and she lost her 65-year-old mother – also to cancer – 16 months ago. Baby Consy was named after her.
And yet there’s no trace of bitterness or self-pity. While clearly in pain and consumed with sadness, she’s articulate, calm and open.
“It would be easy to feel angry,” she says. “I step outside and see lots of babies and I could look at them and think: ‘Why isn’t my girl here?’ Or I could think: ‘What a beautiful baby.’ It’s the only way I can survive, otherwise depression will swallow me up. I’ll end up suicidal.
“I’ve just got this resilience. It’s been built into me that no one is around for long, and I guess with baby Consy I prepared for the worst.”
She stops for a moment and the tears stream down her cheeks, but she declines the offer of a break.
“Speaking out helps me, because I want to use what I’ve been through to help other people. The response I’ve had since Consy died has shown me that I can do something. Grief and trauma aren’t spoken about enough. People bring it up when it’s too late.”
Malin discovered she was pregnant in May last year. It wasn’t planned – her relationship with boyfriend Tom Kemp, 28, was turbulent, to say the least – but she was thrilled at the prospect of becoming a mum and even more excited to find out she was having a girl. She and Tom decided to give things a proper go.
“I wanted her to have a good upbringing so we tried to draw a line under the past and move on. I was still grieving for my mum who’d died in the November and I’d been partying a lot to try to block it out.
“But as soon as I became pregnant, I immediately went sober and started eating well and dealing with my grief in a real way.
“So this little girl already saved me from going down a really bad path. I had her growing inside me so I knew I had to work harder to do things the right way.”
The pregnancy itself was textbook. Malin had no sickness and Consy was an active baby, always kicking, which is why Malin instinctively knew that something was wrong when the movements suddenly decreased at 33 weeks.
“I was at Tom’s mum’s house and we were playing Monopoly so I was sitting still for the first time that day – that’s when I noticed she wasn’t moving much. I gave it a couple of hours and we were trying things to get her to move like drinking iced water, moving around a lot and singing. She gave a little kick but that was it. I told Tom to take me to hospital – I knew something wasn’t right.”
At the hospital, doctors picked up an irregular heartbeat and within 45 minutes of arriving, Malin was having an emergency C-section.
“I was panicking, overwhelmed. I screamed out for my mum. I had Tom there, but I just wanted my mum. It’s just not how you imagine it all happening.”
Consy cried as soon as she was delivered, but soon stopped. Malin couldn’t see what was happening, but the doctors were resuscitating her – she effectively died for two minutes before they brought her round.
She was then transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) for specialist care and so, dosed up on morphine and against medical advice, Malin discharged herself from Luton and Dunstable Hospital to be with her daughter in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, staying by her bedside around the clock.
“There was no way I wasn’t going to be with her,” she says. “No way. I was recovering from the C-section, but I pretended I could walk fine and me and Tom legged it to Great Ormond Street.
“It was the first time I’d seen her properly. She was in an open incubator so we could touch her and stroke her and I was just thinking: ‘Why?’ We didn’t know what had caused it, so obviously I was blaming myself. Was it because of something I’d done? But the doctors just said she had a really weak heart.”
The four weeks in NICU were emotionally and physically draining. Hopes were raised only to be dashed again and Malin was often left on her own for long periods as Tom stayed away, struggling to cope.
“Sitting there for 24 hours a day, watching the heart rate monitor. Sleepless, not eating. Is she weeing? Is her heart rate slowing? Just crazy. They kept on saying: ‘She’s not going to make it.’ Four times they told us that. But then she’d show signs of getting better and we thought she’d pull through.”
Malin began expressing her breast milk several times a day for Consy to receive through a tube.
“It felt like the only thing I could really do for her to give her some sort of strength. I wasn’t able to hold her so it felt like a way I could bond with her.”
Consy spent a lot of time sedated, but there were times she was awake and alert. Malin would lean into the incubator and gently say: “Mummy’s here,” and Consy would search for her.
“She definitely recognised my voice,” says Malin. “I loved it when her big brown eyes were open and we had that connection.”
On the day she died, she opened her eyes for the last time and Malin was there, staring at her.
“It was just me and her right there,” she says. “And then that was it.”
She takes a deep breath before reliving those heartbreaking final moments on January 22. Consy had caught a virus, which proved too much for her heart to take. The doctors came in for a routine change of tube and Malin remembers the alarm sounding. Suddenly, a team of medics burst in.
“I moved to the other side of the room and I could hear them doing the CPR and I was telling myself it would be fine. They spent an hour trying to resuscitate her. I can still hear them saying: ‘Five, four, three, check.’ I felt completely helpless.
“Then the doctor came and told me there was nothing more they could do and I just screamed. It was like there was silence all around me and this empty scream.
“They put her in the Moses basket and I was wearing a hoodie pulled up over my face and I remember it was soaking wet with my tears. I was looking at her and my friends were starting to arrive. Then Tom got there too.”
Malin was asked if she wanted to hold Consy, but she couldn’t bring herself to.
“She looked completely different, full of fluid, poor thing. She didn’t look like her. I went to see her in the morgue later and she looked beautiful again. Just really peaceful and that’s how I want to remember her.”
The day after Consy died, Malin went to Camden to register both her birth and her death. She shakes her head, still in disbelief at the weeks that followed, when she contemplated taking her own life and felt abandoned by Tom, who was dealing with his grief by shutting down completely.
“It was a few days after she died when it sunk in and I didn’t leave my bed, racking my brain to come up with reasons why I should carry on living,” she says.
“My mind was going crazy, but I just had to use every bit of strength I had left. I knew I didn’t want to waste Consy’s precious life. I thought about what my mum went through, born in the slums in Sri Lanka and raising four kids on her own and what a beautiful life she made for us. And so I’m not going to let those two lives go to waste. Obviously, I’m human so I’m going to cry, but then I pick myself back up and get on.”
At the funeral, everyone wore white and somehow Malin survived the day. She says she could feel her mum pulling her through.
“No mother wants to bury their child, but I was glad we did it. I could feel my mum around me. I felt – I feel – guarded.
“I don’t want to keep it in. It happened and I need to talk about it. I don’t want to go back to where I was after I lost my mum. Tom’s not really lost anyone close to him so he doesn’t…”
She breaks off.
“He says she was his too, and I know he loved her to pieces, but it’s not the same. And so we just pushed each other away. We didn’t want to be around each other, but then when we were apart I was lonely and sad.”
They have been trying to make a go of it again recently, but Malin isn’t too optimistic.
“We get on good for a couple of weeks and then he goes back to the same old. I don’t know if there’s a future. I need to focus on myself, but the loneliness hits me at night – that’s when it gets me.
“I had a lot of friends, but they were there for a good time rather than when things go wrong. I can count on one hand the people I talk to every day and who check up on me. It teaches you who your real friends are. People don’t know what to say.”
The recent death of 2017 Love Island star Mike Thalassitis hit Malin hard. The tragedy came less than a year after Sophie Gradon (who was on Malin’s series of the show in 2016) killed herself and has led to accusations that the show is failing in its duty of care to the stars it creates.
Malin took to social media, begging producers to “wake up” and revealing that when Consy died, she received a bunch of flowers and no phone call. When her mum died, she didn’t hear from them at all.
“I know some people think they shouldn’t have a responsibility to look after you forever, but I’m grieving in the public eye and I think they do have a duty of care for that,” she says.
“One of the producers called me up after my tweets and we had a good talk. I told him I’d love to help future contestants – I’ve been through it, I can talk to them because they need after-care in place.
“We had a psych test before we went in asking: ‘Are you suicidal? Have you self-harmed?’ Are you really going to admit before you go on a reality show that you’ve been suicidal? Of course you’re not. Maybe things will change now. It’s a bit late, but I hope so.”
She’s cynical about the show she made her name on and reality TV in general (“It’s sad that we expect to get careers from it… you end up desperate and selling your soul on Instagram”) and says Consy’s death has made her realise that the things she used to agonise over – body image, looks, weight – really don’t matter. She posted a bikini picture last month and spoke of her pride in her postpartum body. “No baby,” she wrote, just a ‘beautiful scar” to remind her.
“I used to be obsessed with being skinny,” she says. “I’ve got liposuction scars – why did I do that to myself? Our bodies aren’t designed to have fat sucked out of them. And then I’ve got my section scar and that’s what tells my story. This has completely changed how I see myself.”
Consy’s post-mortem results didn’t give Malin the answers she’d hoped for. She’s planning on undergoing genetic testing to help further investigation, but the likelihood is that it was a one-off, unexplained tragedy.
“She should have gone a long time before she died. I should have had a miscarriage, but she fought and she fought and I’m so proud of her for that. That’s my mum in her. My mum refused to go. She was like: ‘No!’ She fought three cancers – I saw that in Consy and I’ve got that in me. I have dark days, but I can pick myself up again.”
Malin has been putting her energy into developing an app, which she hopes will be Consy’s legacy.
Covering three sections – mind, body and soul – the Consy app is set to launch in the next few months and will provide tailored signposted support for its users.
“I want everyone to know who she was. I want people to use it when they need help. Consy will help them, like a little angel for mental health. I want it to be free to download and a game-changer for mental health support.”
Malin knows there will be certain days throughout the year she’ll need to steel herself. Mother’s Day last weekend, then Consy’s birthday, Christmas Day and the anniversary of her death are going to be particularly distressing.
“I can’t dwell on them too much, otherwise I’ll get lost. So I’m going to look on her birthday as a celebration of her life. She was a beautiful blessing and even when I go on to have other children, I’ll always be her mummy.
“And look at what good has come of her life! This little girl has taught me so much in such a short space of time. I’ll always remember looking at her innocent, untouched face and just thinking: ‘Wow, that’s purity’.”
She has a recurring dream, she says, that’s so vivid, it feels real. “Consy is about five and she has long dark hair and she’s holding my mum’s hand. I can’t see their faces, but I know it’s them. I’ve had it four times now and my brother has dreamt something very similar.”
She brushes away a tear and smiles. She hopes she keeps on having that dream.
“I always wake up from it with complete peace,” she adds.
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