[Apologetics] My First Son, a Pure Memory

[Dianne Dawson]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/fashion/21love.html?ei=5124&en=563eab88929a620c&ex=1379563200&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=print

 
 
________________________________
 
September 21, 2008
Modern Love
My First Son, a Pure Memory 
By DAVID HLAVSA
HAVING waited until we were
in our 30s to start a family, my wife and I were having trouble
conceiving, leading to sperm tests, hormone shots and other
extraordinary measures.
Over many months, the process of conception became so technical
that when Lisa told me she was at last pregnant, I found it hard to
know what to credit. After the first ultrasound, she came home with a
black-and-white picture of a tiny curled-up creature. We put it on the
refrigerator: my son, the lima bean. 
At 20 weeks, we went in together for the second ultrasound. The
technician made small talk and popped his gum as he dimmed the lights.
Lisa lay back on the table. I shifted in my seat, jammed my hands into
my pockets, and stretched out my legs like a teenager settling in to
watch a movie. As the technician slid the paddle around on Lisa’s
belly, the image on the computer screen wheeled, dipped and blurred. 
Finally my son’s image popped into focus. Arms and legs folded, he
seemed to be resting on his back, as if lying on the bottom of a pool,
waiting to spring to the surface. 
I said, “Cool.” 
The technician muttered something, hit a button to freeze the image and walked briskly out of the room. 
A few minutes later, in walked a small man wearing a rumpled white
coat and steel-rimmed glasses, his bow tie askew. He shut the door
behind him.
I don’t remember exactly what he said; he looked as if someone had
left him out in the rain. What we had taken for a frozen image, he
explained, was in fact absolute stillness.
We still refer to the man as Doctor Death, perpetually forlorn,
always breaking bad news. They keep him in a closet. (A year later,
pregnant with our second son, Benjamin, my wife turned a corner at the
hospital and saw him at a nurses’ station; she did an abrupt,
involuntary about-face.)
After Doctor Death left, our midwife arrived to explain that we had
a decision to make. Did we want to schedule a D and C or induce labor?
Her language was very plain, but it took a while for me to understand
what she was really asking: Did we want the pregnancy to end in a
surgical procedure in the outpatient clinic, or in the maternity ward
as a stillbirth? We asked whether there were medical advantages or
disadvantages to either choice. She told us it was simply a matter of
preference. No hurry. Let us know.
On the drive home, we were mostly silent. As if exchanging
telegrams, Lisa and I said what we needed to and no more. We each
assumed there was only one possible decision, so when we talked, we
talked logistics: appointments to reschedule, job responsibilities to
manage. We asked questions we might have asked the midwife, about
recovery time. 
Then we realized we weren’t in agreement. I was talking about the D
and C, while Lisa had decided to give birth. Incredulous, I asked why
she would want to go through all that pain. She said she couldn’t
imagine just getting rid of our child by a surgical procedure; she
wanted to see him. 
So I had to ask myself: Why didn’t I want to meet my own son?
Clearly, it wasn’t Lisa’s pain I was worried about. We pulled into the
driveway, phoned the hospital, turned around and drove back.
Going to the hospital for a stillbirth is the photographic negative
of going for a live birth. You carry the overnight bag, check into a
room in the maternity ward and so on. But they put a marker on your
door to alert the nurse-midwives that, in this room, things are
different. 
As a means of inducing labor in a body that is not yet ripe, Pitocin
is brutally effective. But it can take a while to kick in. After an
hour of flipping through magazines, Lisa and I decided to take a walk.
The nurse said it might speed things along. 
Wandering about in the midwinter dusk, Seattle sinking to the bottom
of the gray scale, we were about a quarter mile from the hospital, just
about to turn around, when the drug took hold, doubling Lisa over. We
considered calling a cab, but she decided she could make it, so we
stumbled back with her arm around my shoulders for support. 
By the time we reached Lisa’s room, her contractions were frequent
and prolonged — much more so than they would have been at the early
stages of a natural labor — and each surge of pain seemed to levitate
her body above the sheets.
When at last the anesthesiologist gave her an epidural, Lisa sighed
and fell back into the pillows. Within an hour, she was asleep, and
shortly after that, I dozed off as well, like a Lab curled up in the
armchair at the foot of her bed.
My first son was born some time in the gray dawn. In such cases,
there is no rupturing of waters. The birth sac slips out whole and
unbroken. The bag was a little bigger than my fist. The midwife put it
on a towel and, with a small pair of scissors, carefully snipped it
open. 
She unfolded our son’s limbs, disentangling one from the other,
unfurling him like a new leaf, talking softly to us all the while,
describing him. He was about five inches long, she said. He was
anacephalic, which means his brain and nervous system had failed to
develop. He had probably died about a week earlier. 
Gingerly, she handed him to Lisa, and though it was clear that Lisa
wanted to hold him longer, it was only a minute or two before she
passed him to me. Later, she told me she was afraid he would come apart
in her hands.
Resting on my outstretched hand, he was thin, nearly weightless, his
skin pinkish-gray and translucent. He seemed to me less like a small
baby than a scale model of a stripling child. I cradled his head
between the ends of my middle and ring fingers, his features peaceful,
perfect, blank. His feet reaching nearly to my wrist, his toes were
like mine and my father’s, the second toe longer than the big toe.
When we got back from the hospital, the epidural had not quite worn
off, so Lisa did not have full use of her legs and clung to me as we
staggered up the front steps. Thinking of ourselves as a public
spectacle (How must we look to the neighbors? Drunk again!), we burst
out laughing. Once inside, the bleak humor continued: Anacephalic? All
right, so he won’t go to Harvard. 
It wasn’t until I had settled Lisa onto the couch that my own legs
quit working. I was in midsentence — something about an errand —
teakettle in hand, halfway between the tap and the stove. A spasm went
through me, I doubled over and I heard my own voice howling from far
off, the full-throated cry of a child.
On the day I went back to the small college where I work, I felt
myself in another kind of altered state, not above the flow of daily
life but just below its surface, heavy, settled, still. I had been
thinking about how to tell people: my colleagues, my students. Some
knew that Lisa and I had been expecting a child; clearly I had to tell
them what happened. 
Others didn’t know about the pregnancy, though. Should I spring the
whole story on them all at once? When a parent dies or a partner — when
we lose someone who has lived in the world — there are customs, worn
paths to follow, ways to talk about it. But I didn’t see any path with
this. Was I supposed to keep quiet and pretend nothing had happened? I
couldn’t accept that. 
So I typed out an e-mail message, brief and plain, explaining: Lisa
had been pregnant, the child had died and we took some comfort from the
belief that all he had ever known was love. I stared at the screen for
a long time. 
Then I clicked on the top of the e-mail program and addressed the
message to everyone at the college: faculty members, students, staff,
people I knew well, people I didn’t know at all. I had a fleeting
thought that this might be inappropriate, but then I pressed “send.” It
felt like a form of protest.
I wasn’t really looking for a response. I wanted just to get the
news out; I couldn’t bear to repeat it over and over. And although my
department’s administrative assistant did field a few complaints about
receiving something so personal by a general message (“Who is this
guy?”), most apparently understood or at least excused my gesture. 
AND then came the outpouring: for weeks after, people I barely knew
would come into my office, gently shut the door and burst into tears. I
heard stories of single and serial miscarriages, pregnancies carried
nearly to full term, stillbirths — all the lost, lost children. Grief
hauled about, and nowhere to put it down. Some said they had never told
anyone; who would understand?
My first son is like the faintest scar on my skin now, nearly
hidden. Over time, will the mark disappear as my skin becomes mottled
and wrinkled? 
Lisa was planning to bury his ashes, about a teaspoonful, in the
garden, part of which was to be his. Instead, she kept his ashes in the
bedside table drawer, right next to her, as if afraid he would wake in
the night and need her. She felt him close to her, a wisp of spirit,
the smallest presence. 
But he’s gone now, she says. Offhand, I don’t know where she keeps
his ashes. But not in the garden. The garden is hers and Benjamin’s.
When Benjamin was very young, just beginning to speak in sentences,
he asked if he had a brother once. Lisa paused a moment before
answering, but by the time she started to speak, he had moved on to
something else. 
David Hlavsa is a professor at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash. 

 
Like a deer that longs for running waters so my soul longs for you, O God.
Ps 42:1


      
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