Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (29 page)

“Without what?” I croak.

Dr. Kuzmi
ć
looks at me and asks, “Where is your husband?”

“In the coffee shop across the street,” I reply.

“Let’s go get him. I need both of you.”

As we exit the old Petrova Hospital all the sounds are muffled and acrid diesel fumes engulf my nostrils. The sunlight feels opaque, as if there’s an eclipse of the sun.

My husband is reading the
Slobodna Dalmacija
newspaper and sipping his coffee. When he sees us, he stands up in deference to Dr. Kuzmi
ć
, whose wiry figure towers slightly over my husband’s six-foot-four frame as he asks, “Can you come with us?”

“Sure,” my husband responds as he pulls out dinar notes to pay for the coffee. We go up two flights of stairs to a set of doors on the top floor of Petrova Hospital. “These must be doctor’s quarters,” I mutter to myself. I feel privileged that Kuzmi
ć
brought us here.

“The baby is without a neural tube on the very base of its skull, a small but critical anomaly. We will verify with other tests, such as alpha-fetoprotein to make sure.”

“What does this mean?” I choke on the words.

“We are not sure yet, and we need to wait—”

I interrupt him. “But if the diagnosis is right, what then?”

“Then you will have to terminate the pregnancy. But no need to think of that right now,” Kuzmi
ć
concludes.

It’s Thursday now. The blood is drawn. “There is nothing for you to do since Monday is a national holiday,
Dan Borca
(Day of the Hero). We are closed to outpatients,” Kuzmi
ć
reminded us. “So, it’s best if you take a few days off and just relax until next Tuesday, when we will draw more blood to compare the alpha-fetoprotein levels. Do you have a place to go?” He knows that our village is in the Dalmatian hinterland three hundred miles from Zagreb.

“Yes, we planned to visit friends in Bosnia,” I whisper.

As soon as we leave Dr. Kuzmi
ć
, my husband demands that we get a second opinion. The diagnosis is quickly confirmed.

“Let’s go and talk to another physician; our child’s life is on the line,” he keeps saying. After two days we have four additional opinions.

It’s Friday night in Br
č
ko, Bosnia. With our hosts we are watching the annual Split Music Festival and the only televised event on the single Yugoslav channel. The winner is a young performer, an unknown Matko Jelavi
ć
, for his song, “Majko Stara,” (Old Mother), which will become an iconic melody across Yugoslavia—reminiscent of Bosnian
sevdah
pathos blended with Dalmatian lament:

Old mother, listen to your son’s song

Mother,

Who decided to take away my dearest?

No tears left to cry out my sorrow

Night is quiet, the sea is breathing peacefully

The weekend is spent in a blur of colors and emotions. Shots of
šljivovica
, a plum brandy, are taken before every meal “to open the appetite.” Instead of opening my appetite, the brandy sears my innards, and I can barely taste it. The family we stay with gives us a tour of the villages near the River Sava. I feel my visit was an omen—in a short time the smell of smoldering fire and bullets will be echoing throughout the valley. Everything seems to happen too quickly. With each step the ground feels liquid. In me and all around me I can see the destruction about to erupt. My own tears of anguish will soon bathe my country with tears of war, and “ethnic cleansing” will become the norm.

It’s Tuesday morning, and Dr. Kuzmi
ć
meets us at the door to Petrova Hospital. “The alpha-fetoprotein test verified the diagnosis. You will need to terminate the pregnancy, but we could still wait and do another ultrasound and one more blood test,” he says.

“No need,” I say. “Before the weekend I went to four more locations within Zagreb—a clinic, a private physician, and two other hospitals. They all confirmed the same diagnosis.”

Kuzmi
ć
looks at me with a gaping mouth and finally utters, “That’s quite incredible. We can induce an abortion this afternoon, but you will have to be admitted to the hospital for a few days.”

Once I am admitted, my husband is told to stay at the front door—or the coffee shop across the street. No family is admitted into the ward.

I am in a room with three other woman, all three pregnant and well into their last trimester. They are “bed resting” in the hospital “to protect their pregnancy” during their last weeks. They look at me with pity. I look at them and at their swollen bellies with wariness. I roll on my side and curl up. I am given a concoction of medicine and Nurse Barbara tells me that, “Professor Kuzmi
ć
will stop by after his afternoon exams and rounds.”

After a couple of hours the room begins to spin, and I feel separated from my body. I do not want to accept the fact that I am a person in this body. The spinning continues and after hours of asking for help, the Professor walks in, and I try to explain that something is wrong. He says, “Don’t worry, that’s the feeling of hallucinating when one takes narcotics.”

The lights become fuzzy and blurry. I am wheeled into the adjoining room, an exam room of sorts. I see the Professor lift the lid from a steaming pot and grab worn-out rubber gloves that have been disinfected in hot water. My eyes close as his hands slip on the heavy latex.

Several hours later I wake up to hear the Professor’s words to my husband. “It’s too bad—it was a boy.”

When Nurse Barbara returns I ask her if I can see the baby. She says, in a manner suggesting she has uttered these words a thousand times, “It’s best that you don’t see it. It’s down there in the basement room with all the formaldehyde.” I freeze and words lodge in my throat. The nurse looks down at me as if to decipher what the problem is. In an anguished voice I say, “But he’s my son.” I close my eyes, and everything becomes dull.

Heather Lynne Davis

Yesterday, during the ultrasound,
the doctor called it
fetal demise
.

Today, these are
the last words I hear
before going under.

I know so many women who have
staggered through this loss.

I used to think how awful
to carry a fetus
dead
inside you
for hours, days, or even
weeks. How gruesome, how
wrong that must feel.

But now
I don’t want to
let you go,

give you over
to the operating room, its machines,
this whiteness,
these lights, cold
containers, stainless
steel.

You are mine.
You are me.
We are

safe together.

When the D and C is over,
there’ll be no trace,
nothing on heaven or earth
to show.

I want only to rise up
off this gurney and walk away,
take you with me
before the terrible
theft begins.

Bright bright red in long rounded rivulets
divides the white of my thighs, surprises me because
there is no pain. I am standing
after the D and C, all miscarried
tissue gone. This is
the first rising, the first moment
upright in a flimsy gown, hidden
by pale blue curtains. A drop

falls, makes a crimson fractal
on the beige suede of my sandal.
I wipe my legs with the wet
paper towels they give me. I
stare at the blood on my shoe—
one drop on one shoe—
her blood, his blood, our blood,
the last blood.
I don’t wipe it. I want to walk
with this touching my skin,
the final
thread between us.

I put my clothes back on.
I walk.

Tiffany Pitts

In memory of our sweet girl, Elliston Rae.

O
ctober 26, 2012. In one moment I inhaled the breath of a firsttime mom, voided of any real sense of pain or loss, and exhaled the breath of a mother whose heart, dreams, and life has been ripped apart. In that moment I lost my daughter. In that moment I said good-bye to the self I had always known.

I had a normal pregnancy—just enough sickness to make me aware that we were still pregnant and successfully moving along through the first trimester. This was not my favorite part, although it calmed my anxiety over our miscarriage five months prior. At our thirteen-week ultrasound, we watched in amazement as this shockingly human-looking little baby jumped and turned and jumped some more. It was really happening! At our twenty-week ultrasound we confirmed our thoughts from the moment we found out we were pregnant—we were having a girl! A perfect, healthy, active little girl.

During my pregnancy, two people I knew had stillbirths. I had never heard of this before. Out of fear and out of ignorance, I did not reach out to them. At the time, I felt that any words I could muster up would be so insignificant. I would come to find out the only thing that comforted my husband and me was knowing that we were thought of. Knowing that someone shed a tear for us, for our situation, and for our perfect daughter who should not have died. And most of all, knowing that people were not afraid to say her name.

When I was thirty weeks, we surprised our family who had traveled into town for my shower by having an ultrasound done at our home. When the technician walked in the door my first words were, “Hi! Please check the cord. I just need to know that the cord is not around her neck.” He was a bit taken aback. Probably not the greeting he was expecting. It took about forty-five minutes for our little girl to even look in our direction, but once she did, I was thinking more about her plump lips and nose than about asking more questions about the cord. I figured if there was a problem, he would let me or someone else know. Any fear I had carried up to that point was now gone.