Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (10 page)

The baby was limp when they pulled him out, but everything was still okay, of course. It had to be. It always would be. “Letting go” was the crux of my life philosophy, the best way to dissipate panic and anxiety. Stuck in the middle backseat with a driver tailgating at 85
mph? Let go. Airplane turbulence, oxygen masks dropping? Let go. No cry from a baby just freed from the womb? Just let go.

No one in the operating room was talking to me. No one was looking at me. Everyone was huddled around the baby. They’d moved him to a table at my left, they’d called more doctors in, and all of them were blocking my view. They took turns pressing on his chest, moving his legs up and down in infant calisthenics. “Is everything okay?” I finally asked the doctor, and she simply said, “No.”

That “No” marks the line between who I am now and who I used to be. Am I wiser or just more wary—of luck, statistics, best-case scenarios? Of course I understand now what “letting go” really meant back then: not just that things would be “okay,” but that they would turn out well, in one of the handful of positive ways I could envision.

At four the next morning I woke up after twenty-four hours of shock, of staring blank, at bawling family members and friends, of holding hands with my husband. I was staring again, this time at that huge, institutional clock across from my bed—the same kind they use in schools, in prisons—trying to figure out how to go forward. The clock’s hands were moving forward. The clock made sense: all those tiny divisions of time, perfectly spaced. I was falling behind as the clock ticked ahead.

This was not happening. This was not part of the challenging but happy future that I had recklessly let myself imagine, that had expanded along with my belly over the past nine months. That life included kicking feet to fill the tiny socks from the baby shower, now washed and matched and folded, waiting in a basket by the changing table. That life included a warm baby on this cold September weekend.

Everything was now exactly the opposite of what everyone, absolutely everyone, had led me to imagine. After they gave up on reviving the baby, the nurses had spirited me out of the birthing ward and into the dark mirror at the other end of the hall, a wing they don’t show you on the tour for expectant mothers. They made a plaster cast of his feet for us—they were old, wrinkled, as if a sad, heavy lifetime
had already creased his soles. He was ice cold from the morgue. No socks could warm those feet.

I was stuck behind the glass of a clock moving backward, or maybe not moving at all—I couldn’t hear a tick. The minute hand was circling the wrong way. Before four a.m. the previous day, my letting go had floated me through a life of grace. Now, with every silent click, another moment that used to add up to a charmed life became one mere moment of good luck, just one of the short black lines encircling that blank face of random circumstance.

Anything—anything at all—could happen next. Things wouldn’t necessarily turn out well. Things could continue to turn out very, very badly for the rest of my life. For that matter, “the rest of my life” might not last the hour. I had neglected to acknowledge that luck could be both bad and good.

I have two toddlers now, two boys. My older son, almost four, has already lost a cat, so he often asks about death. I’ve told him about his older brother Christopher, as we named him, but mostly I avoid his more general questions about death. I tell him it’s going to be okay, and I struggle to believe my own words.

Right now, right this very minute, it’s more than okay. I love my two living sons and my husband with certainty, without the insubstantial what-ifs that can make people with safe, healthy lives long for something else. I never take anyone I love for granted. I never take my life for granted. Christopher gave me that gift.

But of course any or all of us could die at any moment, for any reason, bizarre to mundane. Christopher was a fluke, stuck on the wrong side of the statistics—one in thousands our doctor told us when we met again in the haze of the long, empty days after his death. But I can no longer trust even the most promising odds.

My younger son, barely one year old, is an expert hugger: he throws his arms around my neck, rests his curly head on my shoulder, and pats my back. I inhale the rich soil smell of his scalp as I return the hug. I practice hanging on.

Bar Scott

M
y son, Forrest, was diagnosed with Stage IV hepatoblastoma in 2000 and died on February 9, 2002. He was three and a half
.

Our house sits on the side of a mountain in upstate New York. Dense woods surround it on three sides, so the front yard is only visible from an airplane or standing on the deck that wraps around our second floor. When I lie in our hammock, I wave at planes flying overhead in case passengers or pilots can see me far below them. I love the thought that someone might be waving back at me. One time I was reading out there when I heard a helicopter coming straight toward me. I searched the sky, but I couldn’t see it until, all of the sudden, it flew out from behind the trees and cut across my view. The men inside were so close I could see their helmets and dark glasses staring back at me. It was scary because it happened so fast. It’s never happened again, but I still wonder what they were up to.

For my husband Peter’s fortieth birthday, I hired a pilot to fly us up over our house to see what it looked like from above. Forrest used to say “up to the clouds, Mommy” whenever I pushed him on a swing, so he was excited to fly into the sky for Daddy’s birthday. Unfortunately, he fell asleep as soon as the engines turned over. I’m not sure if he was sleepy or terrified, but he missed the whole flight.

As the pilot lifted our plane off the ground, Peter and I watched the Hudson River and Rhinecliff Bridge move away from us. It was a clear-blue day so we could see for miles. To the west, The Catskill
Mountains looked like an enormous bowl, and the Ashokan Reservoir shimmered like a golden puddle. Our plane cast a tiny shadow on the ground below us as we moved across the sky. Eventually we headed north toward Overlook Mountain and the town of Woodstock where we live. From there we found Plochmann Lane winding through the trees east of town, past Forrest’s preschool, to Glasco Turnpike, and then West Saugerties Road cutting a straight line below our property. It was easy to see our land. It’s a naked spot in the middle of the woods. Everything was quiet down there, and I could see my empty hammock on the deck. Behind the house, the mountains and trees seemed to go on forever. As we flew over, I could see that our life on the ground was surrounded by wilderness—something I’d never realized before.

So when it snowed hard on Valentine’s Day in 2003, I wondered what our yard looked like from the sky. I often wonder that now because it feels like the sky is Forrest’s new vantage point. When I looked outside, all I could see was quiet, undisturbed snow across our yard and the valley beyond. I’d woken early that morning knowing I wanted to send Forrest a valentine, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. It had been one year and five days since he’d died, and I wanted to make sure he would receive my message. From our living room window, our snowy front yard looked like an enormous blank canvas, which gave me an idea.

I called the local florist and asked him to save any red rose petals he had left over from bouquets he’d made that day. I ordered a few bouquets myself, and then ran around to other stores in the area to buy whatever roses they still had in their coolers. When I got home, I pulled each rose from its stem, and carefully separated the velvety petals from one another. I put them all in a big plastic bag, pulled on my big snow boots and down coat, then picked my way through the snow to the center of our yard. For twenty minutes, I walked
around and around in my oversized boots, packing down the snow until I’d made a heart-shaped valentine for Forrest that was fifteen feet in diameter. When I had it just right, I took the rose petals and spread them out evenly inside the huge heart. Their redness was soft and brilliant against the crisp white ground. I thought to sprinkle snow over them to keep them from blowing away, but when I rubbed my mittens together, the snow froze into tiny balls of ice. They collected like marbles in the bowl of each petal and quickly froze my Valentine’s Day heart in place. It was perfect.

As I stood in the snow admiring my valentine for Forrest, I wondered if pilots flying overhead could see it. I knew if they did, they’d probably understand.

When I finally got back inside I felt good. My Valentine’s Day plan had worked, and I was full of loving Forrest. I’d discovered over the previous year that expressing my love for him out loud was a good habit even in his absence. Something about believing he was there and could see or hear me replaced my loneliness with love. So periodically throughout the day, I went to the window to look at my valentine. It was so beautiful out there in the snow. Late in the afternoon, though, I looked out and was stunned. My valentine was gone. I didn’t know what to think. But then I saw something that made me laugh. Leading up to and away from my rose-petal heart was a single track of deer prints. That deer had eaten my valentine!

A few months later, my friend Lisa called out of the blue. I’d met her the year before. Her husband Teddy had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks, so she and I had a strong connection because of our mutual grief. In a moment of curiosity and desperation, she’d gone to a psychic that morning. She told me that about halfway
through the session, the psychic suddenly paused and said, with some confusion, “Who is Bar? What is Bar? Could it be Barb? No, they’re saying ‘Bar.’ Do you know who Bar is? I see a little boy. He’s holding a man’s hand. They’re saying something about a deer and some rose petals. Does this mean anything to you?”

I laughed again and shook my head. Then I told her about my valentine.

Adapted from
The Present Giver
, self-published in 2011.

Kristin Camitta Zimet

I have no place to lay you down,
my quiet one, gone without enough
living. No round-bellied jar
to fold my hands around, glazed
with soda ash that stings the fingers,
scalds the surface with a pock of tears.

No stopper to hold in this little
heap, this dry dissolve: skeletal
roses, brittle fern, baby’s breath,
scent purely imagined. No matter
what I curl my mind around, this
ribbon unties. I turn and turn

and have no nest to settle in.
I cannot keep air enough under
my feathers, or form a cove
around you. Angels swerve away
from this unripe annunciation,
this shut ground. Only my beasts,

in their diminishment, are trying.
The dog with his crooked back
inches his wolf skull underneath
my palm. The deaf cat digs
her way up, licks my cheek
with a flesh-clearing rasp.

First published in
Quiddity.

Mike Monday

O
ne of the great things about the
Return To Zero
project is the blog on the movie’s website, which contains some of the most heartfelt writing I have ever read. I suppose that should be expected, as parents would naturally be moved to eloquence when sharing their stories of loss with a community that empathizes and cares. The blog is a remarkable forum to help accomplish the mission statement of the movie—to break the silence that surrounds stillbirth.