Ties That Bind (14 page)

I
sat with my bare feet dangling over the edge of the examining table, wearing one of those stiff, crinkly paper jobs that have replaced traditional cotton hospital gowns, and tried to absorb the diagnosis.

Dr. Mandel, who said I could call her Rhea if she could call me Philippa, stood about five foot one, had reddish hair that was giving way to gray, a well-padded frame, and a grandmotherly manner. At the moment, she was just what I needed.

“Don't look so shocked,” she said and scribbled on her prescription pad. “Unless your fertility doctor in Boston performed the procedure while you were under anesthesia and without your consent, you had to know this could happen. Artificial insemination does have a tendency to result in pregnancy. Didn't they explain that part to you?”

She ripped the top sheet of paper off the pad and handed it to me. “Here's a prescription for prenatal vitamins. Congratulations, Philippa. You're going to be a mom.”

“A mom …” I held the prescription in my hands, each corner pinched between my fingers, and stared at it. “A mom.”

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked, her smile fading. “You're not having second thoughts, are you?”

I blinked quickly and shook my head. “No. Absolutely not. It's just … We'd done the procedure so many times. I'd kind of stopped believing it would ever work.”

“Fortunately,” the doctor said as she opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of latex gloves, “it only takes once. We'll do an ultrasound in a few weeks, but for now, I'd like to give you an internal exam. Don't worry, it'll be quick and it won't hurt the baby. Just lie back and put your feet up. Scoot a down a little, please. That's right. Good girl.”

She snapped on a gooseneck exam lamp and adjusted it so she could see better.

“Sorry my hands are so cold. Just try to relax,” she said. “Think lovely thoughts, dear. Think about holding your baby.”

I tried to follow her instructions, but the idea of a baby, my baby, our baby, mine and Tim's, was still a thing beyond imagining. It seemed like a dream. For so many years, it had been.

 

Tim and I always planned on having children, but we decided to wait a few years before starting a family. I was a social worker, later a seminary student, and Tim was a special education teacher, so we weren't exactly rolling in dough. We decided to build up our bank account before having a baby. We had plenty of time, or so we thought.

Every month, we gave 10 percent of our income to the church, used 80 percent for our living expenses, and put the remaining 10 percent into a special bank account for our someday baby—the “junior fund,” we called it.

We were just seventeen hundred dollars away from our twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal when Tim was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.

With aggressive treatment, including chemotherapy, we were told that Tim's chance of survival would be close to 60 percent. Tim was always an optimist, always figured that everything would turn out and so, initially, he wasn't nearly as worried about the success of his treatment as he was about what it would do to our plans for having a baby.

Before the chemotherapy, we visited a fertility clinic and had Tim's sperm frozen. Tim painted an amusing portrait of a grim-faced nurse with no eyebrows and man hands who pointed to a stack of magazines, gave him a plastic cup, and told him to “ring if he needed anything”—but as far as Tim was concerned, this was just a blip on the radar screen of life. Once he was done with the surgery and chemo, he assured me that everything would return to normal and we would spend the rest of our lives together, growing old and wrinkly in tandem. “After all, I've got a better than fifty-fifty chance.”

In time we came to realize that those odds weren't good enough. The cancer spread and the chemo treatments weren't working. In the last weeks of his life, one of the things that brought Tim comfort, aside from his faith, was the thought of our someday baby. He talked about that a lot. He made me promise that, boy or girl, I'd raise our child to be a Red Sox fan.

Tim needed to talk about the future he wouldn't live to see, and I let him, but it was hard. Having a baby was the last thing on my mind. All I cared about then was Tim. I didn't want to imagine a world that didn't include him. And I couldn't imagine raising a child without him by my side.

One day, I told him so.

Tim reached out his hand, asked me to help him roll over so he could see me better. I stood up, grasped his bony arm, careful of the IVs, and wedged my other hand gently under his back to give him a boost. He was starting to have problems breathing by then. I remember how raspy his voice sounded.

“Do you know what's going to happen in the second after I die?” he asked.

I shook my head. I could not imagine that. I didn't want to.

“The world is going to keep on spinning—just like it has since the beginning of creation. Clocks are going to tick, tides are going to come in and go out, couples are going to fall in and out of love, and you're going to feel very sad.”

“Don't.” I put a finger against his lips. “Please. I don't want to talk about it.”

His eyebrows, or rather the place his eyebrows used to be before the chemo robbed him of his hair, drew together. He frowned and pushed my hand away. Weak as he was, he was still strong. Stronger than me.

“Not talking about it won't make it go away, Pippa. I'm going to die. After I do, I know you're going to be sad. But not for always. Life will go on.”

“No. Not for me.”

“It
will,
” he insisted. “One day you'll wake up and hear the birds outside the window and you'll stop to listen and then you'll stop again, realize that, for a while, you forgot to remember to be sad. And when that happens, I don't want you to feel guilty about it, okay?” He reached across the white sheet and interlaced his fingers in mine. “Okay?” he repeated, in a gentler voice.

I bobbed my head because I couldn't speak.

“Good,” he said, accepting my nod as confirmation. “And someday, I don't know when, but someday, you're going to wake up and decide that you're tired of being alone. You're going to want a family, a baby. Two babies. Who knows? You might even meet somebody and fall in love and want to have a baby with him—and that's okay with me ….” He paused for a moment, thinking. “As long as it's not Scott McNally. Remember him from college? What a jerk. Always hated that guy.”

I laughed and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Fair enough. I won't fall in love and make babies with Scott McNally.”

“Good. But if you fall in love with somebody else, a non-jerk, then fine. You don't need to feel guilty or disloyal. You have my blessing. I want you to be happy, Pippa. And if you don't meet someone and fall in love, I want you to have a family anyway, just like we always dreamed we would.

“After I'm gone, take the insurance money and the junior fund, anything that's left after you pay for the funeral and the medical bills the insurance won't cover, and use it for the fertility treatments. I was talking to one of the doctors and he told me …”

I turned my head away. “Honey, I'm tired. Can't we talk about this later?”

His eyes flashed with a hard, dark expression I had seen only rarely in our eight years of marriage but recognized. When Tim looked like that, he had made up his mind and nothing on earth was going to get him to change it.

“No. We're almost out of later. We've got to talk about it now. There aren't a lot of advantages to being on your deathbed, but one of them is that you get to set the agenda.”

“Kind of like how you get to control the remote during football season?”

“Exactly like that. Pippa, listen to me. We can have a baby, our baby ….” He paused and his eyes glowed with sweet anticipation, as if there really was a
baby,
not a test tube of frozen sperm and a 5 to 20 percent chance of fertilization, as if he could see beyond the shadow of death into a future that held new life. “This is the chance of a lifetime! Don't you see?”

I couldn't. Not then. It would be a long time before that would happen.

Tim grabbed my hand, pressed it hard to his lips, trying to kiss me into understanding.

“It's hard, I know, and sad, but … oh, baby, it wasn't all sad! I've loved you so much. How many people get to have what we've had? For a day or even a year? How many? I don't want our story to have a tragic ending. And I don't think it has to, not if we've got someone to pass it all on to, the good times, all the memories. Promise me you'll tell the baby about all of it—how we went camping on our honeymoon and the tent started to leak, about the time I caught the ball in Fenway Park, and how we took that bike trip across the whole state, all the way from Boston to Pittsfield ….”

“And the red-tail hawk flew right over us for the last five miles ….”

His smile beamed. “Yes! Wasn't that something? Tell him that, Pippa. Tell our baby everything we ever did together! Promise me you will.”

“I will. I promise.”

 

After Tim died, I forgot about that conversation. Well, not forgot about it so much as I chose not to remember it. The grief over my beloved's death was so immense that for a long time I felt dead too. I could not imagine ever feeling any other way.

But just as Tim had predicted, life went on.

For the first two months after Tim died, I found it a struggle even to get out of bed, let alone leave the house or go to class. I suppose it might have gone on longer if not for a knock on my door one afternoon in early October. There was a man standing on the stoop wearing blue jeans, a red flannel shirt, and holding a puppy—if a thirty-five-pound dog, no matter how young, can ever really qualify as a puppy.

The man, a breeder of English mastiffs, was Ben Abbott. The puppy's name, he informed me, was Clementine. “That's what I've been calling her anyway. You can always change it if you want to.”

“You must have the wrong address. I didn't buy a dog.”

“Maybe not, but your husband did, about six months ago. Well, not a dog exactly, but he paid in advance for a puppy from Esmerelda's next litter. She's a champion, my Esmerelda. I don't normally sell her pups to people who aren't planning on showing them, but your husband insisted you needed a mastiff and, like I said, he paid in advance.”

“Oh, Mr. Abbott. I think there's been a misunderstanding. I don't know anything about puppies and, anyway, this just isn't a good time for me.”

Ben Abbott sucked on his teeth for a moment. “Here,” he said and thrust the dog into my arms.

Even at eight weeks of age, Clementine was more than an armful, so heavy I nearly dropped her. Unfamiliar with dogs, I held her stomach up, like you would a baby, with her ear flopping backward over my arm. She yawned, stretching her neck, then opened her enormous brown eyes and stared into mine.

Needless to say, I kept her.

There were days, particularly the day when I came into the living room and saw that Clementine had chewed up one entire arm of the sofa, ripping the upholstery and pulling out the stuffing with her teeth, that I wondered what in the world had possessed my husband to buy me a dog. But he knew what he was doing. Clementine was a great companion, and a much-needed distraction from my grief. Most importantly, she got me out of the house. First, just out into the yard, then to the end of the block and back, then on longer walks where neighbors came out of their homes to pat Clementine, say it was good to see me again, and sometimes invite me in for coffee. In the spring, when Clemmie's legs grew longer, I even put her on one of those extendable leashes so she could lope along next to me during bike rides. If not for that, I'm not sure I'd ever have ridden again. Oh, yes. Tim knew exactly what he was doing.

After a year, I returned to seminary, enrolling in two courses that first semester, three the next, eventually working up to a full load, slowly returning to the land of the living, the place where people exist in anticipation of what is to come.

And one day, about two years ago, just as Tim predicted, I went through most of an entire day before I remembered to be sad. It wasn't that I had forgotten about Tim, just the opposite. While cleaning out some closets, I found a bunch of old photograph albums and spent an entire morning going through them, remembering all our good times together and feeling so grateful for what we had shared. But I wanted to share it with someone else, to pass on the stories, the lessons, the love that I had known with my precious husband. I wanted a baby, Tim's and mine.

I called up the fertility clinic and got more information on artificial insemination. The costs weren't as high as I had feared, nor was the procedure particularly complicated. The medical bills, the funeral, what I had spent on living expenses during those months of depression and grief had used up a lot of the junior fund and the life insurance, but there was enough left to pay for several attempts at artificial insemination.

I prayed about it, talked to my parents and the seminary chaplain about it, and decided to go ahead with the procedure. At thirty-eight, I was a little older than most first-time mothers, but I was healthy. But after four attempts, I still wasn't pregnant. My doctor suggested adding fertility drugs to the regime. They didn't help.

Much as I wanted a child, I began to wonder if this was what God wanted for me. Perhaps my calling was to ministry and ministry alone. I spent a great deal of time meditating on the passage in Luke in which the rich young ruler walks sadly away after the Savior tells him to give all he has to the poor and follow him. “There is no one who has left a house or parents or brothers or wife or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who shall not receive many times more in this present time, and in the age to come, eternal life.”