Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (16 page)

I washed my hair and applied my makeup while my son lay dying or dead just thirty feet away.

Something should have felt off about that morning: the sun was too bright, the temperature too perfect for an August day, and the sky too blue. I should have been suspicious. I wasn’t even concerned about the stillness that enveloped the house.

Instead, I was glad for the quiet. As the first one up, I was happy to have some spare minutes to myself. Taking a shower, brushing my hair, actually taking the time to pick out the clothing that I wanted to wear for the day and putting some thought into the decision—these were luxuries that I didn’t often have with a three-year-old and an infant to parent.

I was not a woman filled with maternal instincts. I loved my babies, but I had never played house as a child, never longed to have children, and always thought that I would be perfectly happy to live out a carefree, child-free life with my husband—one full of travels, wine, and the occasional bouts of solitude. Sometimes, I was afraid that I was inherently selfish and lacked that motherly feeling that other women claimed to feel so naturally. I was pleasantly surprised when
I found out I was pregnant with my oldest son, and had loved him from the start, but there were moments that I felt a strong amount of guilt and shame for the quietness and aloneness I craved.

But Toby was different. I didn’t want to let him go.

Quiet and not the least bit demanding, he was happy as a lark to lie in his jungle-themed swing with his diaper full at the seams and his milk bottle empty. He fell asleep like a champ and at seven weeks old was already sleeping five to six hours at a time. When my oldest son was that age, I had yearned for a time when I could have put him down. With Toby, I often held him for no reason other than to feel his little soft body in my arms.

I was worried that the bonding between the two would be difficult, but it wasn’t. The weekend before, we had gone to Cracker Barrel and had sat at a table, eating breakfast and coloring. People stopped and smiled at us—a happy family of four with no worries. Back in the car, my oldest son had called to me. He had slipped his blankie over both of their laps. “Look at us, Mommy,” he said proudly.

“Us.” There was already an “us.”

I couldn’t remember the night before. It had been a tough day, and I had spent most of it on the couch in the living room, Toby wrapped in the bathrobe with me, watching reruns of
The Golden Girls
. I think he found my quoting endearing. I didn’t even manage to get dressed, although I had put him in a summer romper that matched his soulful blue eyes.

During one of Rose’s St. Olaf stories, I quoted her monologue word-for-word. At the end, I touched his nose to mine with a grin. A gurgle had erupted from him, deep down inside, and his little mouth had formed a perfect smile. It was his first laugh. I knew it.

That was the last thing I remembered.

With my new skirt and top on, my makeup applied, and my hair freshly washed and combed, I headed down the hallway to his cradle, ready to wake him up and get him ready for the day. Both kids were
going with me and I looked forward to feeling good and showing them off.

But he was gone.

His normally pink-flushed face was blue, with patches of white where the apples of his cheeks had been. His hands, clutched into tiny fists, were cold. The scream that came from me was not human.

I breathed into his nose and mouth and pumped his stomach while the shrills of the ambulance filled the driveway. The sounds of the paramedics thundering up the stairs and the 911 operator’s voice were not real. The only reality was that Toby was inches from me yet he wasn’t there at all.

My baby had died while I slept, maybe even while I brushed my hair.

The service was over, and the small yellow casket had been lowered into the ground. We had all placed something inside. From me, my treasured gold “Mom” necklace. I had worn it the day he was born and wouldn’t let them take it off of me during labor. Now, it would go with him. From my husband, a small flashlight so that he wouldn’t be afraid of the dark. From his big brother, a stuffed monkey so that he would have something to play with. His grandfather had given him a five-dollar bill so that “the lad could buy some ice cream when he got to Heaven.”

The first thud of dirt that hit the casket was a bullet through me. It stung as though the dirt was filling my own lungs, taking me lower into the ground myself. A friend came up beside me, wrapped her arms around me, and kissed my cheek. She began singing to me as a way to drown out the noise of that dirt—a sound that seemed to echo through the hills.

I sat with my head on her shoulder, the sun beating down on my black dress, my shoes forgotten somewhere between the grave and the hearse.

How many minutes had passed? Ten? Twenty? Sixty? Did it matter? What was time anyway? Toby had lived his entire life in seven weeks. A body can be pushed underground, cast off from everyone else, in less than ten minutes. One minute, I was standing in the doorway, looking at his cradle, ready to get him dressed. In the next minute, my life as I knew it was over—as was his.

The dirt might as well have been covering me up, too. I was dead. I would never be the same person again. My innocence in believing that everything works out for the best had been ripped apart. I would never again look at a sleeping baby and marvel at the peacefulness of their shallow breathing and still body. For years to come, I would wake up first on a beautiful Saturday morning and immediately feel those chills of dread, checking first to ensure that my husband was breathing and then flying down the hall to my oldest (only) son’s room.

And then the ant came back.

It couldn’t have been the same cow killer. We were hours away from home. Yet there he was. Slowly, he walked toward me, his red fuzzy back glowing in the afternoon light. A few inches from my feet, he stopped and stared at me.

This time, I didn’t shoo him away. What was the point? I had already been stung.

Janet Lynn Davis

For Jonathan

Stone not yet placed, but weeds
fill in. New home, extra room.
Crib unused, still up and dressed.

Earlier, the breeze unseasonably
cool. Now, melted sun-pelts splash
across shoulders, drizzle down backs.

See the family ringed around
the site, fingers intertwined,
prayer whispered:

One who carried him into
the world for three seasons.
Another who carried him out
in a tiny white case.
Delicate daughter, able
to comprehend.
First son, tow-headed
two-year-old I think I must be,

Who, moments later, will run off
to twirl a pinwheel. Will scoop up
the small American flag blown loose
onto a narrow hallway of grass,
then wait for feedback.

First published in
The Penwood Review
(Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2005).

Susan Miller Lawler

W
e routinely count our minutes, days, and years. The concept of time itself, however, we don’t count: it simply remains an abstract, humanmade construct that exists because we observe it and make it so.

Time only matters because we make it matter.

In early 2007, while round and full of baby, I taught English to adult immigrants and refugees at a nonprofit organization. For months I showed up in their lives every Monday through Thursday evening as a consistent and stable authority of the English language. I also appeared to them as a woman about to become whole, to have my desire—the presumed desire of every woman—fulfilled; that is, to finally have a child of my own.

I smiled at the students’ faces, full of approval. And initially believed that I was some kind of an imposter, because although I wanted this child more than anything I had ever wanted in my life, every evening that we met to practice English and that they acknowledged my upcoming status as mother, I would pretend that all was well. Privately I carried the knowledge that upon delivery from my womb, my baby would die.

I had only known this devastating fact throughout the last trimester of my pregnancy. Not long before winter quarter began, at a routine ultrasound my husband Steve and I had learned that the fetus, our baby Frankie, had a condition which rendered him—as the medical professionals chose to put it—incompatible with life. His chance of living outside my body was zero percent.

Zero percent, in no uncertain terms, no chance for anything else. I felt sorry for myself. I felt regret, and stupid that I’d waited so long to try to have children. I questioned my worth as a woman. I was deficient, faulty. Why couldn’t I do anything the usual way? How could I not do the most natural thing in the world, to procreate?

Most of my students had children, and they were proud. Two, three, five, six; sometimes even more. Most of my students had also experienced huge loss, with stories that my fellow Americans knew in the abstract only, the stuff of history, newspapers, and fictional movies: religious and political persecution, bombings, extreme hunger. I would rarely hear them talk about their trauma, because most of them were taught to not do so. You pick up the pieces and move on.

This idea sounds similar to what the doctors told Steve and me after delivering the news of our baby’s diagnosis and prognosis.
After the pregnancy is over
, they said,
then you can get on with your lives
. They had presented us with three options to handling this situation: Go to a clinic to have an abortion. Be induced and deliver our baby, who could do nothing but die once outside of my body. Or simply wait until I naturally went into labor once I was full-term.

We answered that we would have them induce labor (why put off the inevitable, prolong our pain, when our baby was going to die anyway?), and the doctors had expressed their approval.
Yes
, they had said,
so then you can get on with your lives
.

Get on with our lives. Not my specific objective really, or one I even felt was possible.

This phrase echoed. As we waited for the induction, I considered the sense in this. I would maintain the same joy and pain whether I was carrying my baby inside my belly or in my heart and mind.

So I changed my mind; I would carry my baby boy until his natural end. The pain would be present no matter what—but I simply wanted to
be
with our baby, even if he could only survive inside my womb. Steve was relieved that I felt that way; he had been independently contemplating the same things.

I reported our thinking to the doctors, who scratched their heads at our decision to carry to term.

After making this decision, I still grieved heavily for our impending loss. Each morning, I needed hours to get myself up out of bed in order to get on with the day. By afternoon I was able to pull myself together enough to fashion a simple lesson plan. By evening I was able to stand before the students, trying not to cry but rather to help them.

I stood in front of the students, somehow managing to focus on their needs. Many evenings the students said enthusiastic things to me about my growing baby, such as:
Teacher, you are so strong to come to class this big!
(I took this as a compliment to my baby.)
So it’s a boy? Wonderful!