Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (25 page)

A decade earlier I had found my true home in bleeding-heart Seattle, where more people fought for gay than fetal rights, where my yoga studio took the place of church, where you did your own thing and respected others’ choices as their own, and where I already
had one perfectly formed child. Talking with Jenn I felt defeated, exposed, wrong, but I wasn’t willing to make the other decision, the one Jennifer would make without even thinking. She would take my baby, any baby, her longing acute and primal.

“Jenn, I…” I started to explain, but stopped.

“I can’t believe you’re not keeping it”—her voice broke along with her heart—“I just can’t believe it.”

I cringed, blocking myself from her words.

“I love you, Anne Phyfe, but I can’t really talk to you right now.”

A Modest Mouse song helped us explain to Lily what was happening. Ours was a “baby cum angels, fly around you reminding you we used to be be three and not just two.” I asked Lily what we should name her brother/angel. “Dash” immediately came out of her mouth. I gasped and my eyes filled at the perfection of that word. He was dashing in and out, and dashing our dreams. Her accidental poetry came from a preschooler crush on the boy in
The Incredibles
, a Disney film about superheroes. This brother of hers was superhuman, not subhuman.

Every night, the bed brought forth the tears. It was an expanse of dark water I could sink into, the perfect environment for grief. I made it through those late-December days waiting for the velvet of night to fall. I had to stay present for Lily, for her process, to help her navigate her own feelings of loss. Once she was in bed, I would lean into the sadness for this ritual of grief.

It would start with a trickle, a tear, a grasping for release. I’d reach for Bez like reaching for a life raft. Once I had one hand on his body I could let the real tears come, the body-racking kind that would send me crawling backward under the covers into the safe tent-like
darkness I’d sought out as a child. Once expelled, it unfurled into the sound of a child after a crying fit—the gasps of inhale, then one heaving exhale—until I found sleep under his arm.

I’d never experienced this before. I’d been sad, depressed, upset, lonely, heartbroken, homesick, dejected, and abandoned, but I’d never felt this kind of grief. It was all encompassing but it was clean, pure, single-pointed. There was no anxiety, no fear, no worry.

I knew that I could safely let it flood every crevice of my body. I wouldn’t drown. I had Bez and Lily to swim up to when I was ready. I could go through this pain and come out the other side. I could move past my grief in ways I imagine would be impossible for a widow, or a parent who spent months or years with their child. Their memories would be stacked as evidence that this person was supposed to be alive. They would want what they had back. I had only weeks of bodily knowing, not snuggles, or embraces, or experiences.

Grief has a comforting cloak. It covers you completely and compassionately, opening your heart to deeper appreciation for what carries on. For me, plenty remains in my arms. Husband, daughter, and now another daughter, Coco.

Sometimes our family takes the short drive to Calvary Cemetery, where Dash is buried. Lily and Coco arrange toys around the stone marker that bears his name, one date, and the words “We Miss You.”

Jessica Watson

A
fter years of fertility treatments and a successful round of in vitro, our triplets were born at twenty-eight weeks. Twenty-eight weeks and five days to be exact. I was counting.

Early labor kept me from ever leaving the hospital, where I had lain day after day, staring at my feet and a calendar on the wall.
X
’s marked each extra day that the mix of medication and bed rest had given my babies to grow. After the threat of delivery at nineteen weeks, twenty-one weeks, twenty-four weeks, and every few days from then on, making it to my last trimester seemed a miracle.

I knew the triplets would be in the NICU, and I was as prepared as any soon-to-be mom of three could be. I had toured the unit, watched the babies born too soon struggling with life, quizzed the nurses and neonatologists, and researched feeding and bonding and every possible medical complication under the sun. I was ready. We could do this.

But when the time came, and my babies and my body could not wait any longer, all my readiness fell to my surgical-slippered feet.

Nothing could have prepared me for the delivery of three babies at once—the sea of hospital masks, the hum of machines, the buzz of anticipation encircled by the quiet of hope.

As the first baby came there was no calm before the next.

There was urgency, and there were monitors and calls for oxygen.

There were NICU teams and respiratory therapists and relays to incubators.

Baby A, my little girl, was brought near to me first, all two pounds ten ounces of her shocking me into the delicate world of mothering a preemie; though she was not as alarming as the one pound fourteen ounces of her brother, the next to wriggle his long pink limbs at my cheek. As the nurses brought them to me, one tiny baby at a time, I wanted to take in their every feature and hold them and love them—but it was not yet my turn. They needed intensive care, and I felt that need and urged the nurses along, fighting my yearning to trace every ounce of their fragile babyness. I would see them soon enough. Forever was ahead of us.

There were several moments between the delivery of Babies B and C, my son and my next daughter…enough for me to take in what was happening, settle into my excitement, and wait for her. As she came by, I adjusted my focus, trying to see her two pounds five ounces of features through the mask of oxygen already mingling with her labored breaths; and as I tried to move my hand to her face, she held me first. Her tiny pink fingers were white at the tips as they wrapped around mine. I did not feel that urgency to let her go as I did with her siblings. The nurse pressed forward before I was ready for her to let go. I wanted to keep her there, suspended at my cheek, squirming with new life, telling me she already knew who I was. My first touch from one of my babies who had endured the push and pull of life all those weeks was perfection. She was here, and so was he, and so was she. All alive and fighting, a testament to faith and hope and unending love.

This small moment, this first touch, was the clearest, tiniest, most profound moment of my life, of my pregnancies, of our seventy-seven days in the NICU, of my marriage, of my days as the mother of four living children, and the mother of one who is not.

One who stopped to tell me that she was okay—that I am her mother and always will be.

One who squeezed a moment of her short life into my waiting hand before she left this place for another.

Faith Paulsen

Years later, across a table
at a charity fundraiser, an Indian palmist
cradles, dips my hand
in water, towels it dry.
At the corners of his eyes, no older than mine,
lines crease and uncrease.
He describes the palmists’ map:
Mount of Mercury,
Father, Mother, Upper Mars, Health,
Longevity, Continuation
of the Progeny.
His finger traces
folds that curl around my thumb, lines
I’ve never noticed before.
And there it is, my private
truth, woven into the geography of my body,
a birthmark.
He counts,
Lines of Children,
three strong,
two weak.

Brooke Taylor Duckworth

In memory of my first Baby Duck, Eliza Taylor Duckworth

I shudder with horror when I look on what I have suffered; & when I think of the wild and miserable thoughts that have possessed me, I say to myself, ‘Is it true that I ever felt thus?’—and then I weep in pity of myself.

—Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein

S
ix hours before my daughter would be born dead, I stood in front of my literature class to lecture on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. We discussed the novel’s preoccupation with issues of life, death, creation, parenthood, and childbirth. I mentioned that Mary Shelley’s biography is intriguing to consider alongside her novel, particularly as she wrote
Frankenstein
not long after the death of her first child, a premature infant daughter. I remarked on how childbirth and mortality in the nineteenth century were connected in ways we no longer think about today. I then rubbed my eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly and said, “Thankfully!” My students and I all chuckled.

You see, I was confident that one hundred and ninety-two years after Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein
, babies no longer died. Well, some babies, maybe. Other people’s babies. “At-risk” babies. Not
my
baby. Not Baby Duck, who was so very loved and so carefully planned. Not my baby, who was nourished with Mother’s Tea and organic produce and healthy protein and yoga breathing and hypno-baby audio tracks.

None of my pregnancy books had told me that love and plans and the very best of intentions don’t keep babies alive. Eliza Taylor Duckworth came into this world on December 6, 2010, beautiful, silent, and dead for no discernable reason.

In between the broken pieces of my life, it must be said, I found profound love. In my husband’s white-knuckled hands clutching mine. In my mother’s tear-filled eyes. In my dad’s shaky voice. In messages from friends and acquaintances. Later, in life-saving connections with other parents who didn’t need me to explain my unspeakable grief because they too had empty arms and shattered hearts. In a world altered by my changed perspective.

A few short months after Eliza died and was born, I went to lunch with a friend. He mentioned that he was going to visit an old Catholic cemetery in preparation for a class field trip. To fill the empty afternoon, I accepted his invitation to go along.

It was a dazzling spring day. The cemetery was as green and pastoral as I could have imagined. I looked around, and everywhere I saw dead babies.

William Tecumseh Sherman’s nine-year-old son: “Our Little Sergeant Willie.”

A baby boy named Otis.

An Eliza—someone’s daughter, though this one died in old age—her resting place in a family plot.

Near her stone, another that read, “Here lies Ann, wife of Henry. Likewise their infant daughter Catharine.” I held a prayer in my heart for Ann and Catharine, and vowed someday my gravestone would have my Eliza’s name on it.

After we saw Kate Chopin’s grave, my friend looked over the cemetery map and asked if I wanted to go up to the Shrine of the Infants, a grassy knoll bathed in sunshine and dotted with stuffed animals, flowers, and other impossibly inadequate tokens of love.

There were decades of baby graves on that hilltop. Some had single dates, many had hyphens separating dates just a few days or weeks apart. A few had birthdates that post-dated death dates. My throat ached with unshed tears as I thought about all the families who had walked this path—those who had literally stood here, mourning a child buried nearby, and those struggling each day to forge a life that goes on without their baby.