Читать книгу Still - Emma Hansen - Страница 11

4

IT IS STILL early morning, but through the window the darkness is softening. Aaron is holding Reid on the make shift bed beside mine. My parents have stepped out of the room to give us some privacy as our nurse, Rose, does an assessment. She checks my blood pressure first, then massages my uterus to help it contract. As she turns the soft flesh of my empty belly into dough beneath her knuckles, I hear a loud gush of liquid.

“Oh!” she exclaims. She lifts up the sheet to examine what has come out of me and with relief assures me it is just urine. “Do you need to pee?” she asks.

I have to think about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. She looks at me, clearly confused, then checks a screen over my shoulder. It is then that she realizes that the epidural drip has been left running. She mutters a few words under her breath. I say a dozen tiny prayers of gratitude that someone else’s oversight gave me a few more hours free of physical pain.

Rose helps me over to the bathroom and places a basin over the toilet bowl. “You won’t quite know how to do this because you’re still so numb. But it’s mind over matter,” she counsels me. I ask her to run the water, but before she turns the tap my body knows what it needs to do.

Back in bed, I’m overcome with fatigue. Rose asks if we’d like to give Reid a bath. I tell Aaron he can if he wants to; I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute or two. Aaron, looking every bit as tired as I feel, asks Rose if she can do it instead.

“Of course,” she says. She grabs a yellow plastic cup, a basin, and a travel-sized bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo and sets up the bath on the counter across the room from us.

I peer over to her every now and then, watching her carefully rub the soap into Reid’s hair as I drift in and out of half sleep. Later, I will read that it is a ritual in many cultures to cleanse the body of the deceased after they have passed—it’s part of the mourning process. We are only doing what is expected after birth, trying to grasp at any sense of normalcy that we can. But I am glad that he is being cared for this way.

When she is finished, she brings him back over to me. I hold him against my chest and breathe him in.

“Do you want to dress him?” Susie asks, coming back into the room.

We put him in the newborn outfit I’d packed long ago to bring him home in. A white and gray outfit with mittens and a hat and a tiny sweater to match. I struggle to get the onesie over his head—I’ve never dressed a baby before. Susie comes over and holds Reid’s head in place as I pull the fabric down over his face. I study it then, the way it is different from other newborn faces I’ve seen, the way it is changing still.

It feels strange to be able to do these things: weigh and bathe and dress him. As he lies on my lap, it occurs to me that he was a part of me for his whole entire life and now here he is, suddenly separate. I want to repair our bond, to somehow absorb him. I want to find our way back to the time and place where he was alive. I want to be together again.

I always thought, somehow, that death would follow the rules. This was supposed to be a beginning; now we are at an end. In this world we now live in, life-altering things happen with no apparent reason or warning.

The rest of our family members arrive. Aaron’s parents, our sisters and their significant others, my maternal grandmother. They enter our room one by one, and it is torture to look them in the eye. I am keenly aware that had Reid been safely delivered into our arms, this is exactly the scene that would have played out—family and friends gathering at our bedside, only it would have been to welcome our son into the world with celebration. Now, as I realize with my stomach churning, they are coming to us in sorrow. It isn’t fair. And yet seeing Reid in the arms of our loved ones feels right. I only wish more people could be here to hold him.

I watch Aaron hold our son, both pain and pride written on his face, a father’s love for his child bursting into the room. I don’t ever want to forget this moment. My own heart throbs to see how Reid can’t meet his gaze, to grasp that he will never get the opportunity. I think of the God that I thought I believed in and can’t understand why we find ourselves in this reality. Still, I find some comfort in knowing that the first face Reid saw was His. I am sure I only close my eyes again for a minute, but now everyone else is gone and a woman I don’t recognize is at my bedside. The skies are starting to brighten and I know that things will start to move quickly now. The woman introduces herself as the social worker and starts to talk about support groups, funeral arrangements, forms to fill out. I can’t absorb any of it. Reid is still in my arms, wrapped in the swaddle I had packed in his hospital bag months ago. A white swaddle with red, gray, and black details, speckled with bears—I’d forgotten how cute the pattern was. I adjust his body; the weight of him is making my hand go numb. He is right here, in my arms, and this woman is talking about all of these terrible things we’ll have to do when he is “gone.” Gone. I mull that over and continue to nod as she speaks. I don’t care what she is saying; everything she is saying feels wrong anyway. I continue to stare at my beautiful boy as she talks.

“…you won’t get a birth certificate,” I hear her say. “So, here’s the form for the certificate of remembrance that you can get. It’s a really beautiful memento; they do an excellent job.” She taps her pen lightly to her clipboard as if to emphasize that point.

My eyes jump up to meet hers. “Sorry, what did you just say?” I can hear my voice crack as my mind fumbles to process her words.

“I’m… I’m so sorry,” she falters. “You don’t get a birth certificate.”

“We don’t get a birth certificate?” This woman can’t be serious. “But he was born five hours ago. Look at him.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. So sorry. But he didn’t take a breath. So…” she trails off and gives me a pitiful half smile as she looks at my son. “He’s perfect.”

“Yes,” is all I can manage as I choke back the tears, “he’s perfect.”

I wrestle with many things immediately following Reid’s death, but none more than this: What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the time-line in which they occur. It’s unsettling.

When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don’t know. I don’t think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?

The person down the hall from me with a breathing baby to hold will receive a paper, one that confirms that, yes, a birth has taken place. I, however, am only given permission to remember. No proof of birth. No proof of either life or death. It doesn’t make sense that someone in government, someone who doesn’t know me, whom I’ve never met, has the power to decide what this baby means to our family. Nothing makes sense. He is right here in my arms.

At seven thirty, our new day nurse, Ava, comes in to introduce herself. I like her immediately. She is young, but it’s clear that all she wants to do is make the hours we have left with Reid special. She says she will call a photographer to take portraits, if we want. She also says the hospital chaplain will be arriving soon and she can ask him to do a baptism. Whatever we want, she will make it happen. She repeats this to us over and over again.

The problem is, we don’t know what we want. None of my lists or plans included things we might want to do with our stillborn son while we have the chance.

“We should do everything we can, right?” I ask Aaron.

“I think so,” he agrees. “We won’t get another opportunity.”

So we do what we can. We say yes to the professional portraits and the Christian baptism and the castings of his hands and feet. We do it all. And yet, we know we will always wish we’d done more.

The longer I hold him, the more he changes. Fluids escape through his nose from somewhere else in his body, like a river carving new forks in its passage. I wipe the liquid up with the edges of his swaddle, and for a moment I imagine that he just has a runny nose.

Right then, Micaela, one of my closest friends, who is also a nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the children’s hospital down the hall, appears. She is balancing a large, flat rectangle, covered in pale-green hospital blankets, in her outstretched hands. She is crying.

“We have to put him on ice now,” she chokes out. Only then do I notice the rectangle in her arms is a bed of ice. “But he’ll still be warm. We’ll wrap him up in this.” She tucks the swaddle up under his chin. I look at her and help with the swaddle. Should I tell her that he won’t be warm? Should I tell her it doesn’t matter? Reid isn’t in his body anymore. This is a corpse.

They say that some families take the body home. Sometimes it helps to see the child in the car seat, the nursery, the bassinet. I almost believe that I can. I’ll strap Reid in and we’ll walk through the halls toward the elevator; another new family will lean over to marvel at the tiny being we too are bringing home. Then their faces will melt with horror. “Yes, well, he died,” we’ll say. “But isn’t he perfect?”

No, no. There is absolutely no way I could manage it. I am glad they offered, though. Later, it will be the things they didn’t offer—things I didn’t know I could have done—that I will grow to regret: not taking a lock of his hair or looking at his eyes or singing songs to him, not taking every opportunity to make more memories with him as a family. But if I bring him home I’ll have to bring him back, and I don’t imagine I’ll have the willpower to do it. They will have to send someone to pry his cold body out of my trembling hands. “But isn’t he perfect?”

At four thirty in the afternoon, after fourteen hours and six minutes with Reid, Aaron and I look at each other. Our eyes are swollen and red. I’ve never seen such a look of defeat on his face. We haven’t been given a limit to the time we can spend with our son, but in this moment we know, as well as we will ever know, that we are ready to leave his body. As much as I don’t want to say goodbye, I also desperately need to.

“Are you ready?” I ask, knowing how stupid the question sounds. He nods, knowing how wrong the answer feels.

Earlier, Ava had offered to be with Reid after we left, so we buzz her now, ask her to come into the room. “We think it’s time. Could you look after him? Could you hold him for us?” we whisper into the bedside monitor.

A crackle, and then: “Of course. I’ll be right there.”

She enters the room minutes later and stands to the side, interlacing her hands, then letting them hang at her hips. She waits. Aaron collects our bags from in front of the bed. Then he bends down and kisses the smooth skin of Reid’s forehead. I reach my hands underneath the cotton of his clothing, picking him up off the bed of ice. A chill travels through my body. I draw him up to my chest. Slowly, I press him into me and take a deep breath, soaking up as much of him as I can. And then—and then I place him in Ava’s arms and walk toward the door.

As I cross the threshold I look back. All around us these guttural cries are ringing. I don’t realize that they are coming from me.

“You can come back,” Ava says, wiping tears from beneath the thick black frames of her glasses. “You can come back.”

I walk back in and give Reid one last kiss. My fingers linger on his chest, where his arms are delicately crossed. I turn to leave, but my arm refuses to follow. His hand, soft and limp in my grasp, slides gently toward the floor. His hat has fallen a little off his head, and his black hair is visible at the edge. His lips are a deep, blood red. I glance at the clock above the hospital bed. 4:45 PM. And then I turn my back and walk away. This time, I don’t—I can’t—look back.

WE ARE FINALLY alone. The echo in our apartment seems amplified in the absence of the noise that should have filled it on our return from the hospital. I look around at all the evidence of our plans. The infant tub on the back of the door, the room stacked ceiling-high with baby gear, the pregnancy books scattered across tables. Then the magnet with the paging details on it, sitting right where we left it on the coffee table.

I close my eyes and whisper to Aaron, “I need to shower, but I need help.” He holds me as we shuffle toward the bathroom. He supports me under my arms and lowers me down on the toilet. He undresses me, slowly. As my shirt brushes past my face I catch a scent that is both foreign and familiar to me. It is the scent of him—of his birth.

In Dr. Patrick O’Malley’s book Getting Grief Right, I’ll later read about a similar experience he had upon sensing something that reminded him of his infant son who’d passed. As a psychotherapist, he researched all aspects of his grief, and wrote:

That innocent sensory stimulus had cut straight to the place in my brain where the memories and feelings of Ryan would be forever stood. It is called the limbic system, a primitive part of our brain where human emotions are believed to be centered. A sight or smell might register there and is then interpreted and named by more advanced parts of our cognitive apparatus. The pungent aroma of antiseptic soap produced tears, which my brain could eventually link to the hospital.

At first, I notice the Ivory Snow. I recall the days I sat in his nursery with his hand-washed outfits in my lap. The smell of the detergent would travel on the breeze coming in through the corner window and I’d close my eyes, basking in it. Even though he only wore one outfit, I know that smell will probably always tie me to his life. It will always remind me of the days I spent washing his things and organizing his drawers.

Then I notice the Johnson’s baby shampoo that Rose washed his hair with. I summon the hazy memories of her lathering his head with bubbles and gently rinsing them out with water that spilled from the yellow plastic cup.

And another scent, one I can’t recognize, one I can only assume is death. I inhale deeply, bringing my hands up toward my nose, as close as I can. “I still smell like him,” I whisper to Aaron.

“Me too,” he whispers back.

A single tear rolls down my cheek. I don’t want to wash it off. I don’t want to be one step closer to reaching our first day without Reid. I don’t want any of it. The minute I enter that shower it will all be gone. The beginning of erasing what little proof I have of his existence.

Once in bed, I look at the packets of sleeping pills beside me. They have given me enough to put me into a deep, medically induced sleep, nothing more. I punch two out into my palm and stroke their shiny blue surface before placing them on the tip of my tongue.

I wait for sleep to come, but it never does. My insomnia is as much biological as situational. I am supposed to be up all night with a baby depending on me for survival. I know that he has died. But my body doesn’t.

In the morning, Susie comes over. I am still in bed, the covers drawn up underneath my chin. She sits next to me and talks about the birth, discussing the stiches and some of the changes my body is going through. I ask her to tell me about her son, the one who died, and listen closely as she does. When it is time for her to leave she hands me a brown paper bag, crumpled at the top to keep whatever it is holding contained. “You’ll want to wash these,” she says.

I peer inside. Neatly folded at the bottom are Reid’s clothes. I sigh, “Oh.” I roll the top down again and thank her.

I don’t know why, but I assumed he would be cremated in them. Or at the very least make it to the funeral home wearing them. All I can picture is that somewhere in the basement of the hospital he is lying naked on a cold metal tray, sealed in a bag and completely alone. Someone would have been tasked with undressing him. I cringe at the thought of him being handled by strangers.

After Susie leaves, when I can allow myself to surrender to the pain, I take his clothes out of the bag and gently lay them on my lap. They smell sour and are stained through with blood. Then, at the very bottom of the bag, I find the small bracelet with a metal heart that I’d been allowed to tie to his wrist. I have the matching necklace, a heart with its middle punched out—the middle that makes up his pendant—sitting on my bedside table. It is meant so that the griever can always feel close to the one they grieve. They can look at the hole in the heart and imagine it tethered to their loved one, as it was when they left them. But here it is in my hands. I throw the bag with the bracelet against the wall and scream into my pillow. Someone lied. Or someone made a mistake, placed it in the bag of his belongings instead of tossing it in the trash and letting us continue to believe that it remains with him. I’m not sure which of the two options feels worse.

The midwives pay their official visits and then many more, bringing their love and grief with them as they enter our apartment. Fiona, the midwife who cared for us during our pregnancy, visits this afternoon. She was out of town when Reid was born. The team called her while she was on vacation to let her know and she broke down. “But her pregnancy was perfect!” she sobbed. “And they’re so young!”

When she arrives at our door she is already red-faced from crying. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for her to step into our pain, to have cared for us as she did and then have this be the outcome. I wonder if she thought we’d blame her. She could have easily never come and we wouldn’t have faulted her for that. But the fact that she does means the world to us.

Fiona says that she was there when they told the other couples in our prenatal group, that they all send their condolences and their love. She says that one of the fathers was so upset he had to leave the room. It relieves me to hear this—not because the father had hurt, but because his act of mourning somehow acknowledges our grief in a way I need.

IN THE FIRST days after, my mind is at war with itself. I want to remember it all. In photos, diaries, and old texts from when I was pregnant. I ask Jill for the pictures from Reid’s birth, lose myself in the tears and longing they bring. I also want the days to fade into oblivion, to wipe the pain from my memory. But I can’t figure out how to keep Reid alive in my heart without the ache. Will it always be like this? I have to believe it will get better. But then, do I want it to? Because when it gets better, what will be lost in the process? Already, I know that it will come at a price.

Aaron and I binge-watch Mad Men. We sit on the couch for hours, only rising to make tea and refill our bowls with cereal—our fridge is full of homemade meals, but we can’t stomach any of them. We think TV will be safe because babies never die there. But we quickly learn that nothing is safe anymore.

In one episode, Don Draper and his creative team are about to pitch a major idea to land the advertising for American Airlines. But on Good Friday, of all days, they get the news that their contact at the airline has been fired. Don is exasperated; the team is in a panic. Then someone asks what it means for them and Don says, “Now we have to deliver a stillborn baby.”

We press pause instantly and stare at the screen.

“Did you just hear that?” Aaron asks.

“Did that really just happen?” I can’t believe it. We rewind and watch it again to be sure we aren’t losing our minds. Before Reid died, I’d never thought about stillbirth—it wasn’t a word I could ever recall hearing. Suddenly, it seems to be everywhere.

But that particular line of Don’s sticks with me, and I think a lot about what the writers meant to say with it. The idea was still beautiful, that much was clear. Fully formed, perfect. But it would never live on as intended. Regardless, they had to go through the motions, as they would with any other pitch. And, I think, as a mother would with any other baby. My milk appears on the Tuesday. My breasts are hot and engorged, vessels full of liquid gold with nowhere to go. One of the first things I asked about after Reid was born was whether or not my milk would still come in. I thought that my body would understand there wasn’t a baby to feed, so I was surprised, and devastated, to learn that the answer was yes. I was told how to help it dry up, and my hand was held as I cried about needing that advice.

I am hit with a fresh wave of grief when my milk does come in. Knowing that it will disappear without being used is overwhelming. Later I will find out—and wish that I knew earlier—that I could have donated Reid’s milk to a baby in need, given purpose to my days. For a little while at least, I think I might have liked that milk to nourish a life, instead of slowly drying up and taking the last physical connection I had to my son with it.

I sit on the couch with frozen cabbage leaves on my breasts, with holes cut out in the center of them for the nipples. Soon, everything I own reeks of cabbage. My bras, my shirts, my sheets. Even my body—it seems to be seeping out of my pores. The smell is worse than the pain, somehow, so I get rid of the cabbage. Instead, I drink gallons of peppermint and sage tea. I make cold compresses from facecloths drenched in ice water with peppermint oil sprinkled on top and soak in baths scented with the essential oils. Sometimes globs of the oil pool together and land undiluted on my skin, burning red patches into my flesh, and I relish the feeling. Some other, separate pain I can pour my own into.

Really, I just miss him. That’s it. That’s the whole problem. I miss him every single second. My body cries for him. In tears, blood, and milk it wails deep into the burden of the night. And there is nothing that can soothe me dry.

IT’S FRIDAY, APRIL 10, one week after, the first of what I assume will be many terrible anniversaries. I wake up often during the night, unable to sleep knowing that one week earlier, in those very hours, Reid had passed away inside of me. I had slept through it. But the date has another significance, too. I know that today, one of my closest friends will be having her baby.

Amy lives in Ottawa, but we’d become friends at university years earlier, when she was the resident assistant of my dorm. We bonded instantly over our love of books and organization and handwritten cards. She had a single room and we would often end up there, staying up late as we talked into the night, sipping hot tea from the cafeteria, me lying on the floor and her propped up on her side in her bed. After I told her I was pregnant with Reid, she’d FaceTimed me—just to congratulate me, I’d thought at first. She had inquired about what fruit size Reid was at the time. A peach, I’d said, thinking her question was odd. But then she asked, “Do you think your peach might like to play with our blueberry?” and held her own ultrasound image up to the screen.

When Amy was twenty weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with vasa previa, a rare condition where the connection of the umbilical cord to the placenta crosses over the opening of the cervix. Her waters breaking suddenly would mean a very real risk of both Amy and her child dying. At thirty-two weeks, she was moved into the hospital and put on bed rest. At thirty-six weeks, she was scheduled to have a cesarean.

I wake up braced for news about her delivery. It embarrasses me to admit it, but I was never really worried about her or her baby before Reid’s passing. Whenever she called me from the hospital during those last weeks of pregnancy, fearing what might happen, I hardly listened. I simply promised her that everything would be okay. It wasn’t that I knew the outcome; it was that I resisted the possibility of a different one. Because bad things didn’t happen to people I knew. And they didn’t happen to me. Now, all I expect is bad news.

Instead, when I grab my phone, there is a text from Brittany announcing that her daughter, Charlotte, has been born safely. She tells me she is experiencing all the expected emotions: happiness, relief, and love. She also feels deep sorrow, grief, and heartbreak. Joy because her daughter is here, but anguish because I didn’t get that same moment. After we shared everything during our pregnancies, including near-identical due dates, she can’t believe that we aren’t sharing the same outcome. I am grateful for her honesty and happy for her, and also so incredibly broken.

Amy’s announcement comes later that morning. They’d been waiting to find out the sex, and she tells me they have a daughter, Grace. The delivery went well. Grace is in the NICU to help with her breathing, but Amy assures me she will be okay. Amy will be okay too.

Although I know better than to make assumptions based on the sex of a baby, that both Amy and Brittany had daughters is a consolation to me, one that could lead to a gentler kind of grief as they grow and Reid doesn’t. I imagine their homes filling with the things little girls sometimes like, and it might be a little less obvious exactly what I’m missing.

Finally, I fall into my first deep sleep that afternoon, collapsing on the couch out of relief and pure exhaustion. I’ve survived the first anniversary. I’ve survived the births of my friends’ babies. Now to survive the rest.