Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (32 page)

Now, I beg you to not politicize the sentiments I am about to share with you. This is not intended to be political or to reflect my beliefs about any form of medical practice.

We entered the clinic, where there were two young women behind a glass partition. I told them who I was, and they asked for $545. It would not be put on my insurance. I questioned them further. “It’s a termination, so that is not covered by insurance.” I was confused, and angry—this was no termination, had they not heard me? “My baby died.” I repeated firmly. I could see that my husband was confused and did not know how to protect me or how to help—and let’s not forget, his baby died too. The woman in the back of the room stood up and came to the window. “If you want to use your insurance, you have to go to the emergency room. I’m not sure if they will help you, though.” I was confused, and hurting, and bleeding. Why would she send me away? Why would I go to the emergency room and sit there just to be sent home? Why were they being so crass? I knew I did not want to leave. I also did not want to stay. I also did not want my dead baby inside of me for one more minute. I wanted my live baby back.

As we sat and waited, all I could think about was that I had not arranged a burial and I did not know what to do about that. When they called me back and I asked to have my husband come with me,
I could tell that I had made an unusual request. This confused me further, but by this point, after signing all the paperwork, it finally hit me. This was an abortion clinic. Yes, they also perform D and C for fetal demise, but ours was the rare case.

My husband came back, and they began to prep me. The room was spartan. The equipment seemed old. I started to have nightmares about rusty needles. I could see that everything was wrapped and clean, as it should have been, but I still felt awful.

They pulled out a small ultrasound machine. They were looking at the baby. They kept the screen turned away from me. I really wanted to see my Peanut one more time, but I was too afraid to ask. This becomes a theme for me…When they asked Michael to leave me so they could start the procedure, I asked, “What will you do with the baby?” A nurse responded quickly, “It will all be incinerated.”

My mind went blank and then I got scared. Incinerated? I did not want my baby incinerated. I wanted my baby buried. Well, I did not want that either; I just wanted my baby to be alive and healthy. Once more I failed myself and Peanut as I said nothing.

As I was waking from the procedure, I asked the nurse, “Was the baby formed?” She said no, but I still think she was lying. I asked a second nurse—I think it was a second nurse; I was still very foggy—“Was the baby formed?” She too said no.

I did not have any strength. They helped me to the recovery chairs. A room of five recliners. Five recliners? I could not imagine having to recover with five other women around me. Fortunately there were none. I asked for my husband, and when he arrived all I could say was “no more Peanut.” Even then I could not ask him to help me find the baby and get him buried.

I still panic thinking of my poor baby in an incinerator, and knowing I put him there because I did not have the strength to ask for a burial. I had so few tasks here on earth for Peanut, and I could not complete this most basic and most important one. I could not give him a respectful end. I sent him to the incinerator.

I have nightmares. They happen while I am awake or asleep. They
happen when I am alone. I wish I had known what to do. How to handle myself. What to say to get help and to get the dignified end I wanted for a too-short life. But who wants to be prepared for that? We make birth plans when we are pregnant, not funeral plans. I will be giving this to my obstetrician, a truly wonderful woman, in the hopes that something can be done to make the process one that provides dignity to the mom, respect to the dad, and closure for the spirit of a baby they’ll never get to meet. I want to say rest in peace to my little Peanut, but I fear I did not provide him with such an end.

Monica Wesolowska

S
pring is the hardest. April 27 to June 4. Every year, I spend those days in vague dread over an end we have already lived through. Even as the thirty-eight days of Silvan’s life shrink proportionally against the growing of my subsequent children—soon Miles and Ivan are one and three, then two and four—I spend those six weeks each year waiting for the end. In the pregnant bellies of passing women, I catch glimpses of him. Holding others’ newborns, I smell him. In every stranger’s six-week-old, I lose Silvan all over again.

On one of those spring days—a lovely, balmy one—I’m sitting on a park bench, chatting with the other parents, when I notice Miles lying splayed on the sand, unblinking, staring straight up. Perhaps he is dead. A dead child is not something I have to imagine. My heart beats wildly. Perhaps, I tell myself, trying to stay calm, he’s merely playing dead to get my attention, to see how I will love him if he dies as his brother did. Suddenly, I am alone, no other parents near, though they sit beside me on the bench. “Miles,” I say with quiet urgency. “Stop it.”

To my great relief, he’s alive. To my greater relief, he listens. He gets up and returns to activities that bother me less but probably bother the other parents more—throwing rocks, balancing large plastic toys on the tops of the monkey bars below which Ivan and the other younger children play. Like any parent, I worry about my children dying. Like most parents, I try to live as though they won’t.

As the work of having young children eases slightly, as dinner becomes somewhat civilized again, David and I begin to look for rituals to bind us as a family. We start by lighting candles every Friday night. This is not about a god so much as it is about pausing to be grateful. How grateful we are for our children. How hard it is to pass that gratitude on. Usually we’re tired on Friday nights, and the children wiggle and giggle until we yell at them to stop, but surely they can find something to be grateful for. We make suggestions. David suggests they feel grateful for the meal I’ve cooked. I suggest they feel grateful for having food at all. This gives them pause, as it should. For they know about death. They have seen dead flies and snails; they know that their older brother is gone.

Their questions start early, startling me.

“What if Silvan were in this box?” Miles asks one day as he’s opening a present.

“Why would he be in a box?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t you like that?” he asks.

A few years later, Ivan pipes up from the backseat of the car. “What if Silvan comes back to life? Would you like that?”

“People don’t come back to life,” I tell him.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Maybe,” I concede because it’s true; I don’t know what’s possible.

In dance class, I’m stunned one evening by a vision of Silvan and me and centuries of dead, pressed up against each other in the dark, at the edge of an underground stream. Since losing Silvan, I don’t know if I believe in souls that way anymore, but I am in awe of all that a mind can contain, more than we will ever know.

If I could, I would hold Silvan again.

But for now, I have only his ashes in a vase in the living room—after scattering a few on the trail where once I imagined his conception, I couldn’t let the rest go. And in a drawer, his pale-blue terry-cloth pajamas. And I have his bench in the backyard. Every year on his birthday, we sit on it as a family. It’s a child-sized wooden bench with a plaque attached to the back engraved with his dates and a quote from his song, the one we used to sing to him. “You’ll never know dear,” the bench says, “how much we love you…”

Over time, the bench becomes hidden.

To find it now, you have to cross to a back corner of the yard, walk up three little stairs of stone, and duck beneath the drooping flowers of an angel trumpet. That was our idea, a place to find if you make the effort. A place to sit and love him.

Often it is other people’s children who find it first. They lead their unsuspecting parents there. When the adults reemerge from under the plants, I wait to see if they will say something.

Some do, some don’t.

And then one day, I find I can forgive those who don’t ask. Not everyone has to know.

Sometimes even I forget, if only for an hour.

One April, a friend tells me, “I had my Silvan dream again last night. I always dream about him this time of year. Is it okay I told you that?”

Yes, of course, I say.

Another April, I run into Silvan’s neonatologist, the one who gave us the news about Silvan’s brain damage, the one who told us we could let Silvan die, if we thought this was the best way to love him. He lives in our neighborhood. “Wasn’t it Silvan’s birthday yesterday?” he asks.

Yes, I say, yes.

Every birthday, David’s sister makes a donation to children’s hospice in his memory; and David’s stepmother calls to thank us for being brave enough to have more children. At my brother’s house,
I see Silvan’s picture. At my obstetrician’s office, too. There he is, golden among a swirl of babies.

If there is a miracle to this story beyond Miles and Ivan, it is that Silvan is remembered. Not by everyone, but by enough. He is my boy, so specifically mine; but in death he can belong to anyone who wants him.

Excerpt adapted from
Holding Silvan: A Brief Life (Portland: Hawthorne Books, 2013).

Barbara Crooker

The sun came up, as it always does,
the next morning, its pale gold yolk
bleeding into the white room.
I remember how cold I was,
and how young, so thin,
my wedding ring rattled
on my finger. How the tea
the nurse brought
broke in waves on the rim
of the cup, spilled over
in the saucer; how nothing
could contain my tears.
Three days later, I left
in a wheelchair,
with nothing in my arms.
The center of this gold ring
is a zero. The horizon,
where the sun broke through,
is no longer a straight line,
but a circle. It all comes back
to you.

First published in
More
(C&R Press, 2010).

Karin Morea

I
’m a perfectionist, a planner, an organizer. I am patient. I patiently waited through five years of marriage—planning, organizing, making sure everything was perfect for the arrival of our first baby. Our son, Bennett, was born two days before his due date on September 10, 2012 after a seemingly healthy pregnancy and labor. He slid into the world at 8:18 p.m., and the doctor held his perfect, beautiful body up for me to see. It was the most anticipated moment of my life, and I knew in an instance, it would forever be the most painful. Having the best and worst moment of your life share the same space within your heart is indescribable, and my mind wasn’t prepared.

As I look toward my son, the only thing I focus on are his eyes, his closed eyes. He isn’t moving; he isn’t breathing. The reality of this moment is that nurses and doctors are running in and out of the room trying to resuscitate my son, my doctor is delivering the placenta, and my husband is crying, but in my memory, this moment is silent. I’m not moving, not screaming or crying, and I’m fairly certain I’m not breathing. I don’t remember much of the following moments, hours, and days, but I know at some point my husband asks me to blink, and I do.

The NICU doctor who has taken my son out of my room returns to tell me he doesn’t know why, but my son is not likely to live much longer, and I need to come see him. I don’t hear him. I already know this—I knew it the moment I saw his closed eyes. I speak for the first time since his birth. I find the doctor’s face and say, “I killed my son.”
He shakes his head. He’s crying. He tries to tell me that’s not what he is saying, but he has to leave the room, as he can’t control his emotions.

I am taken to see my son. I’m wheeled up next to him. He’s covered in wires and connected to machines, and I ask the nurse how long he will live. When Bennett hears my voice he wakes up and searches for me with his eyes, unable to move his body, trying to find the only voice he knows. I stand, look into his dark-blue eyes, and tell him how sorry I am.