Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (20 page)

Yet, in the daylight, she was curious and gentle. I was patient and open. Our bond grew. She stumbled on toddling legs while holding my hand and planted sloppy kisses on my cheeks. I loved this child deeply. I would catch her watching me with a look that said she felt something of the same. Her trust began to last through the night.

When Hanna grew old enough to talk, she would sometimes answer questions I did not ask aloud and understand things I could not explain about how she came to be my daughter. Be it knowledge or imagination, I played along. I did not really care how she arrived, as much as that she was here.

One afternoon, when Hanna was nearly three, she sat at the kitchen island eating breakfast, chatting.

“Mommy, ’member when I was a baby, I was in China, and I called
you to come get me?” she said. She put a thumb to her ear and a pinky to her lips, mimicking an old phone.

“Oh, yes, Hanna, I remember.”

“Why did it take you
so
long?” she asked.

“I came as fast as I could.”

“Did you run?”

Cuisle Mo Chroi Amy Grebe

Barbara Mulvey

T
he life and death of my infant granddaughter fundamentally changed who I am.

Death, and its trappings, marked me early. My grandmother’s death on my first birthday assured many birthdays included cemetery visits. Life/death, joy/sorrow entwined.

Later my infant nephew’s death shook my faith, shifted my interests, and challenged my understanding of the world. But it was my granddaughter’s death that reverberated like an earthquake through my soul.

In 1980 my sister and I were both pregnant, due only weeks apart in February 1981. The day after Christmas my sister suffered a placental abruption. Her once healthy son, delivered lifeless, was revived hours after the placenta bled out. Joseph suffered massive brain damage.

My son followed on February 26, exactly two months later. Pure joy—and gratitude in his safe arrival—enveloped me. Yet as I celebrated, my emotions were tempered by my sister’s pain. Her son, still in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), had a grim prognosis. When Joey died again on May 21, just five months after his birth, he’d lived his entire life in the NICU. That he didn’t have to suffer any longer was small consolation to the devastation of his death.

Over the years I coped by becoming a hospice volunteer and spiritual director as my son grew into a robust, joyful, gentle soul despite
(or maybe because of) the tears his mother, aunt, and grandmother shed during every major life event that celebrated him. Again life/death, joy/sorrow entwined.

Joey’s death stung less intensely as the years passed, but the emptiness, the sadness for the missing child, lingered. A generation later, the lessons learned from Joey’s death about integrating grief’s sorrows into life’s joys would be applied again.

On February 13, 2011, my daughter gave birth to a healthy baby girl. On February 14 my son and his wife had an ultrasound to learn they too carried a baby girl—but their daughter had a genetic anomaly that was, as the doctors pronounced, “incompatible with life.” Offered an abortion, they immediately realized they “could not do harm” to their baby. She was alive and safe in her mother’s womb, and she would remain there until nature took its course. Their choice to safeguard the baby’s life guaranteed their own intense emotional suffering, but for them it was the right choice. The only choice.

And so, as we celebrated the life of one healthy baby girl we began to wait—and grieve—for the child whose life would be so incredibly brief. The unknowable was whether the baby would miscarry early, be stillborn at term, or die within hours or days of a live birth. The outcome took five months to unfold. Five precious months of what turned out to be a pretty normal pregnancy—except it would end in death rather than life.

Powerlessness compounded and complicated my grief. I grieved both for my child and for his child. My son and his wife suffered through the shock, pain, and terrible reality that their first child would grow and live only in the womb. At first I listened to his questions: What did I do wrong?
Nothing
. Did I do something to deserve this?
No
. Could it have been prevented?
No
. I held him as he cried. Then I marveled at his acceptance, his love for his wife and daughter,
his strength, his grace. I learned from him. I was inspired by him. Joy, always one of his strongest traits, remained. He celebrated small moments, singing to his baby, kissing her hello and good-bye, and feeling her kick. Grief couldn’t diminish the awe that his child was growing in his wife’s womb.

Growing up with joy and sorrow entwined had prepared him well. He’d become an amazing husband and father. He lived “Joey’s lessons,” the most important of which was: the present is all there is; embrace its joy, accept its sorrow, and love regardless.

My son and his wife named the baby the night they found out she would die. Naming her made her real. Trinity.

I sought ways to honor Trinity, her parents, and the journey. A private website enabled them to communicate with far-flung family and friends while they managed their need for seclusion and calm. A moment of inspiration created a communal ritual: family and friends were invited to send a small bead infused with their thoughts and prayers. The beads were gathered and strung on a pillow that went to the birthing room as a tangible reminder of the circle of love holding them all. Gifts of beads, prayers, and more came over many weeks offering immense solace and support.

Trinity died in her mother’s womb on June 22. She lasted longer than expected, but she never took a breath on this earthly plane. She came from stardust and returned her essence to it in a swirling ball of energy before presenting her lifeless body in the midst of an unusual lightning storm that lit up the night sky.

During the months of pregnancy we all reminisced about the healing and grace that followed after Joey’s death. We talked about facing hard emotions head-on, not recoiling from the visceral earthiness and messiness of grief. We kept the website updated with news, photos, and many of the prayers and poems sent. We made arrangements with a funeral home and county governments so that when the time came we had choices that worked for us. My daughter-in-law
couldn’t bear the thought of her baby alone in the hospital morgue so we arranged to transport Trinity’s body ourselves.

Special ultrasound appointments enabled us to see the baby alive. We put great energy into living in the moment and enjoying a pregnancy that so progressed normally. However, I couldn’t escape that when I was supposed to be planning a baby shower, I was learning the legalities and paperwork needed to transport a dead body, and talking to a funeral director and getting measurements for a coffin-cradle that my husband would build for our granddaughter.

After Trinity was delivered, she came home for a wake. Family and friends gathered. An impromptu funeral ritual began after sunset; we read the prayers and scripture sent with the beads, sang hymns, and then Trinity’s parents placed her shroud-wrapped body on a bed of fresh red roses that lined her tiny pine cremation cradle. Flowers, prayers, and mementos then filled the space around and above her. Her body was ready for cremation, her spirit already set free.

Two days later, we took an impossibly small box containing her ashes to the river her parents loved. Sunshine. Numbness. Warmth. Tears. Dozens of yellow swallowtail butterflies joined us. A message? We smiled.

After Trinity died, I realized neither hospice work nor spiritual direction prepared me for the depths of bereavement. I tried to hold on to the faith that had sustained me all my life but its rituals felt hollow and meaningless. Prayer was empty. Unable to relate to the ordinariness of daily life, I kept to myself. I was lost. Dispossessed. An alien in what had been my world.

Some of my pain came from “God reneging on the deal” I’d made when Joey died—as in, I’d willingly suffer any of life’s tribulations if you, God, would spare my babies. I’d suffered my share of troubles, faced them with a faith borne of my certainty in the nature of God and the universe. Still, my granddaughter was dead. I raged. Not so much at God but at my own naïveté. My faith wasn’t nearly as
mature as all my study, certifications, and devotion should have made it.

Trinity’s life, measured from conception rather than from birth, was full. Though tears still flow so easily, I can now point to lesson after lesson learned, grace upon grace found, insight upon insight revealed. The pain of Trinity’s death remains and it marks a turning point in who I am and how I encounter the world. My belief in God remains, but my concept of God has changed. Expanded. Deepened.

Rituals continue to be a vital way for me to encounter the Sacred, but once life-giving Catholic rituals remain hollow. While I still believe the essence of what I learned from traditional religious teachings, Trinity’s death has opened me to a different way of understanding faith, religion, and life. I feel like I’ve woken up. I don’t quite fit into my church anymore. This is a huge shift in my identity.

I am grateful for Trinity’s death. I’m not glad she died, nor am I glad for the pain her death wrought. But I am grateful. Through her life and her death I learned how to live in a way that is more truthful, less fearful. I learned not to cling. I embraced that I am One with all that is; that love is timeless. Trinity is gone, yet eternally with us.

Life/death.

Joy/sorrow.

Entwined.

JS Nahani

W
e leave our pasta half eaten, move directly to the bedroom, and undress each other like new lovers. Seven years into our marriage. Nineteen years after our first date.

Are we crazy?
I ask.

Maybe
, he says, laughing.

Are you ready?
I ask, laughing now.

Why not?
he says.

We fall asleep in each other’s arms. He goes back to work the next day. I do the dishes, make dinner, look for a job, talk to the dog—tell her soon she might be a big sister. Days pass into two weeks, when we can take the test. He reads me the instructions while I pee on a white stick. Two pink lines show up before he gets to the second sentence.

Holy shit!
he says.

I thought so!
I say.

We curl up on the floor like a soft pretzel, look into each other’s eyes, acknowledge that there’s no one in the world we’d rather parent with more.

We drive up to visit old friends, share our news as if we’d known all along. As if the words “pregnant” and “parents” had been part of our own vocabulary all these years. Like the words “joyful” and “enthusiasm”—we’re only just learning how to form them, but there they were, waiting.

We spend winter evenings listening to the rain, under soft
blankets, with the dog nestled nearby. She cocks her head in that big sister way as we read about eyelids appearing, lungs forming, arm buds developing.

I eat lots of cereal for a while, then—anything but cereal. Each night, I pop a prenatal vitamin and don’t even miss my antidepressant. We meet cousins from LA for lunch at the water. On the elevator, in my red jacket, hiding the new bulge, I turn to him and say:

I haven’t felt this happy since I don’t know when
.

And I mean it.

We make love again, I bleed a bit afterwards, and call the advice nurse.

Spotting?
she asks.

That’s common
, she says.

Still, she sends us to Urgent Care, since it’s a Sunday. So we go wait for hours in a room with windows. I feel calm, even as tears flow. The nurse has the name of my grandmother.

Your cervix is still closed
, the doctor on call assures us. We keep our growing love tucked away, tied to our heartstrings, voicing it only to our inner circle.