Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (24 page)

We are staring at our son. I’ve loved a child like this before. The familiar feeling of being consumed by passion and adoration for my newborn baby floods my heart. Stroking his cheeks and head, I can hear the nurse and doctor crying for us quietly. Walker is warm and wet, the way a newborn should be. His little body feels good against mine. His back is the softest thing I’ve ever felt. I am shocked at his beauty. He is perfect, and I am overwhelmed with love and grief. How can he be so perfect and dead? How can he be beautiful and dead? How can I love him so much but not get to keep him forever, or even for a day? Walker looks like he is sleeping the most peaceful sleep. I keep nudging him, trying to wake him. “Wake up, baby!” I plead. I run my fingers down the side of his adorable face, from the top of his head down his cheek to the tip of his sweet little pointed chin. I kiss his bald head over and over. I kiss his nose. I kiss his lips.

My love for this sweet little boy who is mine tricks me into moments of joy that are promptly snuffed out by the depths of sorrow. I can feel the ache of my broken heart consuming all of me. I am proud to be his mama. I think my heart will explode with love and despair. I want him with every morsel of my soul. I am ravaged by pain and a depth of aching that makes me desperate and sick. I want to cuddle and kiss this little perfect dead body. I want to look at every little inch of him. I examine his ears. They are small like mine, with little attached earlobes, and I beam with satisfaction that he is mine. He is fucking adorable.

Tyler is eager to hold his son, so I let him. The nurse wraps Walker in a swaddling blanket, and I watch my baby cradled in his daddy’s arms. Tyler adjusts the blanket and peaks at Walker’s big chest. He kisses his forehead and his cheek. I love to watch this man I love hold a baby. He does it with such confidence and tenderness. He cradles Walker like he’s trying to protect him. Tyler’s face cringes in pain, riveted with sobbing and sadness that I’ve never seen.

The nurse takes our baby in her arms. She unwraps him. We notice
his hugely swollen little testicles, and we smile at each other. She sets him on the scale: eight pounds, eight ounces. His chest is full, and his body is stout. He looks like a little ox with a perfect angelic face. He is so familiar. He looks like my dad, and his auntie, and our daughter when she was tiny. He has his sister’s chin and Tyler’s beautiful full lips. His feet are huge. The nurse dresses him in a nightgown with a bee on it. I wish we had some of his things from home. I don’t like the nightgown; it isn’t what I chose for him. But it goes on easily and his skin is so fragile. The bumblebee reminds me of my sister whose middle name is Be. Caroline sets him down in the glass hospital bassinet, leaving the sides of it open. It bothers me, even though I know he won’t wiggle and fall out.

I gesture that I want him back, and Caroline carefully passes him to me. I hold him against my chest and cheek. His body isn’t warm anymore. With every ounce of my humanity, I try to warm him. I wrap the blanket more snuggly around him and pull it up to his chin. I put my cheek against his, and I try to keep him from getting any colder. It is torture to feel my son growing cold. I have no idea that I will long for this moment with him over and over. I don’t know if I will survive this, but I have a daunting feeling that, mercilessly, I will. I am sick with shock. We haven’t yet told anyone he is dead. It seems like admitting it will make it true. We haven’t wanted to ruin Fourth of July for our families, and now it’s the middle of the night.

We are beginning a long and miserable journey through hell. I don’t know what it means, but in darkness and disillusionment I vow not to sacrifice my life for my grief and love for Walker. And I vow not to deny the depth of my despair and love for Walker. My world is crashing, crashing, crashing in on me. It’s sunny and bright, but I am trapped in hell.

Sarah Elizabeth Troop

I
t’s one of those things that you never hear about. The chances of it happening to your child are so small; it isn’t something you will ever need to worry about, because it isn’t going to happen to you. At least that’s what the doctors say. However, someone has to be the one percent. This time, it’s me.

My baby was diagnosed with a very rare genetic disorder. A “fatal prognosis,” one nurse called it. Another doctor actually handed me a prescription slip to take to the hospital’s Labor and Delivery department. On it he refers to my little one as a “lethal anomaly.”

The doctors, all five that I have seen, tell me the same thing. I can carry my pregnancy to term, but my baby will die. I can be induced and give birth now, but my baby will die. I can undergo a surgical procedure to end the pregnancy, and…my baby will die.

No matter what I do, the result will be the same. My baby…my future, my heart, my hopes, my plans…will die. It feels as though I, too, will die.

At the hospital I sit at a desk while a nurse asks me questions as part of the intake procedure. I hear shuffling and commotion outside the rooms and pick up bits and pieces of conversation from the medical staff. A girl has been brought in. I cannot see her; I can only hear her heart-wrenching sobbing. Someone brought her in because she was trying to kill herself.

I can hear everything now, as there are just thin partitions between she and I. A doctor is in with her now, informing her that she is
pregnant. She cries harder and claims she didn’t know. The doctor questions her sternly: How could you not know? What did you think was happening to you all these months? The doctor informs her that she is just a few weeks away from giving birth and like it or not, she is indeed, going to have a baby.

The girl is screaming through her sobs. Saying again and again, “I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” It is terrible to hear someone in so much pain, but she is only voicing what I cannot. The unbearable pain, the heartbreak, the desperation. We are two sides of a terrible coin this poor girl and I. One who desperately does not want her baby and one who desperately does.

I feel myself beginning to rise out of my chair. I have every intention of circumventing the partitions to find this invisible stranger who has everything I want, to comfort her and tell her not to worry. I will take her baby.

That isn’t what I want, though. I want this baby. I want my baby. I want none of this to be happening right now. Not for me, not for my baby, and not for this girl.

Simultaneously, nurses come and take each of us away to rooms where I can no longer hear her. I wonder how either of us is going to live through the coming days and months. Me with my empty arms and hers full with a baby she does not want.

It has been a month since I have been without my beloved baby. Much of the time, even the effort to breathe or get out of bed seems overwhelming, but I do try my best. I do.

Most nights I dream of the girl. I embrace her, stroking her hair and drying her tears. I speak in gentle tones, telling her not to worry and that she should be strong for her baby. Someday, everything will be fine. I hold her baby and wish it were my own. I wake up.

So Much Love, So Little Time Erica Danega

Anne Phyfe Palmer

“L
ook, Lily, do you see the baby?” Bez asked softly and pointed to the screen. She lifted her head from focused drawing and squinched her eyes to concentrate on the lines—more random than the ones she’d been drawing herself. Lily’s head tilted to one side as she filtered the patterns on the screen to make sense of their alignment.

“Oooh, lookit, Papa, I see a foot!” Shiny little bones rippled at one corner of the screen. Above them a long straight femur wavered then disappeared.

Patricia lifted the ultrasound transducer out of the substrate of gel and wiped it on a paper towel. She smiled warmly and left us to get the radiologist. “You can take a trip to the restroom if you need to,” she told me. “The doctor will be right in to take a look.” I swung my feet around and reached for Bez’s hand to heave myself off the table. A stool helped me to navigate the extra foot or two of height, my midsection already weak with expansion. I had a sweet little belly, just big enough at eighteen weeks to feel genuinely pregnant. I pulled my shirt down and wrapped the long cardigan sweater around this pronounced bump. Self-satisfaction combined with love hormones exploded every time I reflexively pulled one side then the other across and tied the knitted belt. It was both a swaddling of my midsection and a message to baby: “There you are little one, safe and sound.”

What seemed like forever passed before the radiologist came in, nodded kindly, and went to the machine to linger, as the technician
had. Little did we know that he had been watching all along, like the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain.

I smiled sheepishly at Bez as this man I’d never met ran the thick white wand over my bare belly. My sweet and introverted husband lifted his eyebrows and smiled back. I tried to take deeper breaths and enjoy the time off my feet while the doctor continued to explore. The image on the screen was so hard to understand, the moiré patterns constantly changing. It was hard to really imagine a baby within all of these lines. The doctor was quiet, and focused, until he finally spoke.

“See your baby’s heart?” the doctor asked.

The lack of warmth in his delivery was my first clue that something was amiss. This was not a compliment on my child’s organ structure. Instead of nodding an answer, I froze in place and held my breath to stop time and move it into reverse. My own heart surged with a galloping syncopation.

I saw the heart. It was beating. It looked perfectly fine to me.

So I stalled, silent. There was nothing for me to say, no way to take back what had been revealed. The doctor had discovered something that I could not see, or feel. We learned that there was something fundamentally wrong with the heart of our perfect little baby, this sibling for Lily, the completion of our family. We left the building in shock, our lives forever changed.

A week later my phone rang. I stared at Jennifer’s name on the display for a few moments before answering. She was calling from New Orleans, a faraway place where most everyone we grew up with went to church, had lots of kids, and favored right-wing politics.

I sat down to accept the call, reluctantly. I always pick up when my sisters call, but I didn’t want to bring Jennifer into our situation. It could open the door to possible judgment, advice, or concern that would conflict with our nascent decision to terminate.

Breathing deeply as I answered, I placed my hand over my belly, as though it were a totem, and braced for Jennifer’s rapid-fire accent. I had a hard time understanding her over cell phones now that I was far removed from my mother tongue.

But today she was quiet, and curious. She knew about the ultrasound, that we were in the midst of a medical calamity. Neither of us brought it up at first—not my baby, or the baby she wanted more than anything. Since high school, Jenn had been waiting to get pregnant. Now that she was newly married, they’d been trying for a year. I no longer asked how it was going—the fertility project. I knew I’d be one of her first three phone calls the minute the tides turned and she was with child.

“So, well, what’s going on with your pregnancy?” she finally asked.

“The testing is taking forever with everyone on vacation for the holidays.”

“What are they testing for? Don’t they know what is wrong?”

“They want to see if it’s genetic.”

“What does that matter?”

“They want to know if it’s more likely to happen again, or just a fluke.”

Jenn was unusually quiet on the other end, but I could hear her brain calculating, ticking away.

“You want to know whether it will happen again to know if you should keep the baby or not.”

“We…” I started, hiding behind coupledom.

“You aren’t going to keep the baby, are you?” she spurted.

“No.”

No, I‘m not going to keep my defective baby. No, I’m not going to be that parent who dedicates her life to the care of her sick child. I’m taking the easy way out. I’m a bad person.