Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (3 page)

When I became pregnant for the first time, I received the godlike capabilities that all mothers innately possess. It is the ability to tell when a child is lying to your face, or where a tiny set of hands may have hidden a cup of milk just before it turns the electronics drawer into a hot box of putrid fermentation. It is the unexplainable capacity for wild crazy love for a small human that only ever needs and takes—and yet somehow you cannot give enough. It is that same love that makes the endless giving strangely pleasurable.

In the time before Zachary’s diagnosis, I often took my daughter Hannah, a buoyant and single-minded one-year-old, for walks along a small birch-lined trail not far from our home. When a wolf warning was announced this past summer, I imagined coming across a scraggly yet sleek ash-gray creature. Famished, its low gaze would pause on Hannah who stood several paces ahead of me, before it ran at her, teeth exposed. In that moment, this wild mother-god love within me would pounce forth with animalistic ferocity all its own and tear the beast to pieces until it was nothing more than a mass of muscle, bone, and fur.

Nevertheless, I did not have enough divinity to see this coming.

As we arrive home after the memorial I am a whistling kettle, the why questions piercing darts into my bedraggled brain. Later, with Hannah asleep in her crib and lullabies dancing in the hall, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror. Naked. The heat from my warming shower casts a dreamlike swirl of steam around me. I wish this were a dream. Am I living someone else’s life I ask the person looking back
at me; it is an idea which I nearly convince myself is the only logical answer.

This cannot be me in the reflection, I am not this woman with breasts dripping colostrum onto her toes. It makes no sense. My arms ache for my son. As I think of him, of a baby’s cry, my milk grows to a trickle—but Zachary did not cry. I will never know the sound of his voice.

I’m crippled by the lack of an outlet for my anger; it is as if my hands have been severed from their wrists. Control is a taunting illusion dangling before me, and I cannot grab hold. Who is to blame for this? No answer. I am bitter at Aaron, who left me while I greeted the long line of fellow mourners. I abhor the doctors that pressed me to terminate Zachary’s life before it even began. I loathe the funeral home that demanded a strict collection time for my son’s body and then arrived two hours and fifteen minutes late. I said good-bye every minute for 135 minutes, the sorrow of injustice mounting until the funeral-home worker finally arrived. I could have killed the man.

I had planned to file a complaint when we went to collect Zachary’s ashes a few days later but was too startled by the tiny silver urn, a heart with shallow etchings of painted white birds hovering on blue wind. Holding the heart in my hands, its weight likely no more than two pounds, I listened to the audible swoosh of my son’s ashes as I rocked him back and forth. Too few ashes it would seem, but a newborn’s bones are small, only a tiny collection of dust and hope. I was too distracted to yell, and instead whispered, “Just get me out of this place,” in Aaron’s ear.

Zachary’s heart failed. An intimate evil—a tumor so large and dense that echocardiograms appeared white and sound waves could not penetrate the mass—had wrapped itself around the married chambers of my son’s heart. Like a tailored coat, it fit so perfectly they almost became one and the same. Operating was not an option. Zachary’s heart would be minced along with the tumor.

Despite the doctors’ dour predictions, Zachary survived labor and was born alive. He did not cry; he did not open his swollen eyes.
He lay upon my breasts making small movements amongst my kisses. That was all. A silent film—no words but breathed “I love you’s” from trembling lips.

My mother-god within could not save him. I had no answers, no power to attack this tumor as I would a hungry wolf. I was helpless and thus cheated. The indifference of nature’s force raped a lifetime from my cradling arms. This incomprehensible ‘act of God’ split my chest, exposing my still-beating heart and the fear I was unaware resided within. As a child, I was scolded for wishing to die before my mother, my love for her so great I thought it would be the better way. I did not understand it then.

I do now. It is as if I have died along with my son. In the natural order I should precede him, surrendering my last breath long before would he gave up his own. Yet I am here, living, while he is ash in a cold silver heart in my hands. I am somehow transfixed in a purgatory of life and death, trapped in a no-man’s-land of the soul, neither places of substance, both ghostly and unwelcoming. This is a time and space outside of time and space. There are no walls, no doors, just the muddled openness of abstraction. To stay in one place serves no illusion of rescue yet to run with no end is a madness all its own.

Then I hear it, the voice of my savior, calling me out of this darkness, forcing me to live, breathe, be present in each new day, to make plans, dream a new future; calling me to hope and love and forgiveness. The voice is small yet demanding, knowing though not comprehending.

“Mommy!” Hannah’s first morning call from her crib. “Eat!”

Aoife Goldie

I
f you drive west from our apartment, it takes less than half an hour before you hit that quintessentially English countryside—woodland, rolling hills, and fields divided into patchwork quilts by hedgerows.

I’ve watched that landscape change through the seasons. Listlessly, I’ve gazed out the car window at frosty skeletal trees in winter, the burnt yellow grass in the peak of the summer, the turning of the leaves in autumn, or the snowdrops, daffodils, and crocuses tentatively peeking above ground in early spring.

We’ve made that journey often since May 2011.

His final resting place. The place where John and I will also be laid to rest one day. A place of both immeasurable pain and perfect peace.

When I had imagined the end of my pregnancy, it was all sweat and grunts, exhaustion and pain, and John urging me on, willing me to dig deep for one last push—then a rush of joy as his first little cries filled the room.

In reality, my labour was largely silent. Whispers and knowing looks. Solemn faces and broken hearts.

Shock had dragged me underwater, distorting sounds and slowing everything down. Placed a Vaseline-smeared pane between me and everyone else. Left my mouth agape, mute and ineffectual. Scrambled my brain, making every decision difficult and foggy.

Inside my head I tried to trace the way back…

John and I fell in love in a little-known ski town in New England; all cedar-clad gingerbread houses, decked with winter-long fairy lights, sparkling in the crisp air. A small town inhabited by larger-than-life, bearded and burly, gruff Vermont-sters, frequenting the bars, glugging back frothy gallons of Bud Light to a soundtrack of nineties rock.

John was in his second ski season when I took a break from law school to fly out for a visit. His pseudo-celebrity status as a ski instructor had me all googly-eyed and weak at the knees. His command of the terrain, weathered complexion, and strong legs all conspired against me and I was a goner…

It was the happiest place in the world for us, and the place where John proposed to me in 2008.

For weeks after we were married we joked about how grown-up it felt to be calling each other “Husband” and “Wife.” And as my belly grew and swelled with the promise of the best chapter of our lives just around the corner, we giggled again like school kids as we talked to my bump, referring to each other as “Mummy” and “Daddy.” I remember it felt glorious, trying it on like that.

When our midwife returned, she raised the bedsheets and gently explained, “It’s time. Your baby is coming.”

A second midwife came in to assist, and I held John’s hand. In the moments that followed my boy was with me. I felt it like the sun on my skin. However gone he already was, he was there. It was just the two of us, together. He looked after me, helping me all the way. Such a good little boy. I pushed, twice, and it was done.

Seamus slipped silently into this world at 7:06 p.m. on Friday,
May 20, 2011. Bottom first—if only we’d had the chance to tease him about that over the years—with his little clenched fist held against his face, and his umbilical cord wound tightly around his neck eight times.

The midwives whispered as they disentangled my boy, working away at cleaning up his little limp, lifeless body before handing him over to me.

The most precious gift.

The best thing we ever did together.

And in that instant I felt like I’d forgotten to breathe, like my heart would burst with love…pure, new love like no other.

“
Look
. Look what we did. Look who we made.” It was in that moment that John felt like a Daddy. Wide-eyed and mouth ajar, his voice was a half whisper and higher-pitched than usual, choked in utter wonderment. His large hands tentatively took their first touch of his son, clutching his little fingers, stroking the side of his soft, soft face. His face lit up with such pride as he took his precious son carefully into his arms and cradled him close. It was the image I’d longed for…but the colors were all wrong.