Holding Silvan (16 page)

One morning, I ask David to take a photograph so I can see the sweetness I'm feeling as we lie together in bed. I can feel Silvan's eyelashes moving on the skin of my neck, the butterfly kisses I have not felt since my father used to give them, telling me to stay still and quiet, to pay attention to this tiny gift of his eyelashes moving on my cheek. But the outside view of this moment tells a different story – there I lie, exhausted, with a creature on me, his arms as thin as sticks, his lips open against my chest as if making one last attempt to feed. It is the only photo that truly horrifies me. It is an image I would prefer not to have
created with words. But I must be honest. In a different world, loving him enough to let him die could have been less awful.

 

“WHAT WOULD YOU say if I gave him a fatal dose?” David finally asks. He's hitting a wall. Morphine was held out to us as the panacea, and yet now that we're here, we're told that people get used to morphine, that a baby especially can metabolize and live for a long time on increasing doses. Thirty-five days old, thirty-six; perhaps he will always be alive.

“Is there even such a thing?” I say.

David doesn't know and the question is stalled for another day.

Each day it seems Silvan can't possibly survive another; and then it is morning again, and David is having thoughts of morphine. I worry my husband will lose his sanity if he can't give his son a fatal dose. And I'm afraid he will lose his sanity if he does. If our suffering is necessary proof that we have made this choice out of love, then we are proving our love in spades. This is not the slippery slope towards callous euthanasia; this is the steep climb, I think, towards something more selfless and noble. But finally, I have to ask David to stop talking about it. I tell him I can't risk having him accused of murder. I can't risk him
feeling
like a murderer. This is the law, whether we like it or not. We don't have this choice. Besides, we are nearer to the end than the beginning now. Can't he wait?

And maybe it's easier this way, to forbid him.

Forbidden, David admits he couldn't have done it.

 

AND THEN IT finally comes. In the middle of the night, in the middle of our bed. We think our baby is gasping his last. The sound wakes us from heavy sleep to horror. David turns on the light. I hold Silvan while David fills the dropper with morphine.

This will be, we are sure, his final dose, the dose given to relieve “agonal” breathing, the dose that relieves the pain of death. And yet I'm sick from having been jarred from sleep. My
arms feel too weak to hold my baby. David thinks we should each administer half the dose so that neither of us will feel responsible. He goes first. We're both sobbing. The bed sheets are in a tangle beneath us and it is hard to sit up. I don't want to say goodbye to him like this, half asleep, in the mess of our bed. David says we should sing. He breaks into our song:

I try to join in but my throat closes and still David goes on –

 

I dreamed I held you in my arms

 

– but I am so sleepy, I want nothing more than to flop down and maybe I can, because Silvan seems to have recovered.

We stare in disbelief. Yes, his breathing has become soft and easy again. In a flash, the terror that he would die is replaced with the horror that he has not, which is replaced with relief that he's still with us.

 

“YOU DID THE right thing,” the hospice nurse tells us the next morning.

“But why did he recover?”

She looks surprised. “The morphine just relaxes his breathing so he's not uncomfortable. It will only help him die if he's already dying.”

All that next day, we stay home alone with him, but there is no change, no more scares. At last, needing relief, I call my mother. She's at our house within ten minutes. As David and I walk around the neighborhood together without Silvan, I am at peace knowing he's in his grandmother's arms and that within a short while, he'll be back in mine, and that we may go on and on like this forever. Just like with Mark in those last weeks of his life, it's impossible to believe that Silvan will ever really give up. After all, I'm getting used to him, to the strain of loving him to death.

“HIS SYSTEM IS STARTING TO SHUT DOWN,” THE HOSPICE nurse finally tells us. It is early June; Silvan has been alive for thirty-eight days. We have been waiting since April, and yet now that I'm told his end is near, I no longer believe it. The phrase itself repels me. “Shutting down.” I remember seeing his heart in my first ultrasound. To my surprise, the sight made me cry. There it was, this new life, this second heart beating right inside me. The last thing in the world I want is for that system to shut down. Shutting down means we are past the point of no return.
His beautiful kidneys, his exquisite liver, his heart. They are being ruined. They are betraying him. We have betrayed him. Soon he won't even be able to take another breath. Don't leave me Silvan. Please don't leave me. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry.
And so it passes through my mind and yet, here I am, still sitting in my armchair holding my dying son and nodding at the hospice nurse.

But she can tell. “What will make it okay for him to go?” she asks gently, turning, for the first time, all of her attention on us.

“I just need him to die in my arms.” As I say it, I feel all the desperation in my voice of someone making a final wish. I am bargaining with the genie again. If I'm to have a baby who will die, then
please
just let him die in my arms. After having come so far with him, how can I not be granted this one, tiny wish that he not be alone at the end?

“Do you understand it may not happen the way you need it to happen?” she asks.

Of course, this is death we're talking about. I nod. Just as I could not control his conception, his birth, I know I cannot control his death. And yet, I am pleading. I cannot imagine any other end but in my arms.

His temperature is way down, she reports. He has not peed in days and days. His heart is beating slower and his breathing is irregular. “His system is definitely shutting down,” she says, “but as to time, it could be today, it could be a couple of days.”

“Could it be another week?” I ask.

“No, no, I don't think another week,” she says.

She doesn't
think
so? No one has ever thought it could be another week. But if it is another week, does that perhaps mean he will go on forever?

He takes three breaths. We wait. He takes another breath.

 

DAVID SETS UP the little inflatable mattress on the table next to my plate. We're eating chicken with Gavin whom we'd called that morning and begged to come soon, to come today. Gavin hasn't been by since we brought Silvan home and there isn't much time left. Every so often, I turn from the lunchtime conversation and check on Silvan. He's so calm, his brow unwrinkled. I run my finger across that brow and the day seems perfect: good company, good food, my baby there within reach. How glad I am to have that balance; everyone at peace. There is a veil of clouds on the sky, a golden warmth to the day, that pleases Gavin and me. We talk about favorite temperatures and humidities and the simplicity of our pleasure is satisfying.

Then, as lunch ends, Silvan gives his little, creaky door cry, not much, but with a baby who asks for so little, we jump for his slightest wish.

I pick him up and hold him in the kitchen while David does the dishes. Then we go into the living room. I sit, still holding Silvan. Gavin has just told us he's been feeling down for months, that this is why we haven't seen more of him. He's struggling as a stay-at-home dad. Then he apologizes for having a complaint
so petty in comparison to ours and I love him for it. Still, I start to have that feeling that I need to be alone with Silvan. I think perhaps I'll excuse myself to give him a bath. This, I'm sure, will be the last bath. I am eager for one last bath. I need to see his body in all its naked glory. But first, it is time for his scheduled medication – he is so calm, it hardly seems necessary, but I don't want him slipping into pain. I sit him up.

David gives him his doses. I wait for Silvan to swallow, then lower him to the crook of my arm. But something gurgles, like he is snoring with every exhalation.

“What's that noise?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” David says, “He's got medication in the back of his throat.”

He takes Silvan from me. He holds him face downward but nothing comes out and the snores still come.

“Do you think it's the death rattle?”

David shakes his head. He's sure it's the medication. He takes Silvan and rotates him side to side. Then he gently turns him upside down. For a moment, that's okay with Silvan. Then, as the skin of his face puckers around his chin and grows pink, he reacts, gives his squawk.

“Give him back,” I say.

David gives him back.

I soothe Silvan with a mock criticism of the beating he's taken at the hands of his father, but David seems to have fixed the problem. The rattle is gone. Silvan has resumed his slow, calm breathing.

We continue our conversation and then, a pleasant ten or fifteen minutes later, while Gavin is talking, or David is talking, or somewhere in between, there is no breath. How do I feel no breath? And how long ago was breath? The bundle of Silvan feels different. Heavier, more still. I watch his nostrils. I will not alarm David unnecessarily. I watch. No breath comes. No breath comes. The men continue talking about something I cannot hear. I put my fingers to his neck. I've never felt for his pulse this
way before. I feel no pulse. But I've never felt for it before. Maybe I just don't know how. So I watch his nostrils again. Still no breath. I put my fingers to his neck. Still no pulse. Then David notices something different in me.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

“I can't feel a pulse.”

Gavin grabs his jacket, I think I nod at him as he slides from our house.

David goes for the stethoscope. He listens to Silvan's chest.

“Is there a heartbeat?” I ask.

“I don't think there is one,” he says.

So we sit there.
David doesn't know either
, I think. After a while, I say, “So do you think he's still alive?”

“No. There's no heartbeat,” he says.

“Oh my god. I was sitting here thinking you didn't know, because you said you didn't
think
there was a heartbeat.”

“I'm sorry, I think he's dead, ” David says. “I mean, he
is
dead.”

 

I SIT WITH my son. He is warm and still and calm.

Both my sister and David's sister are expected for visits shortly so I ask David to call them and tell them not to come.

He isn't ready yet to say Silvan is dead and so he says, “Hold off on coming. Silvan's having a hard time.” Then I realize that my sister may go out for the evening instead of coming here and that my mother will be alone when we call back. So I have David call with the truth. And he calls his sister back too but his sister has already left work so he has to leave a message on her home phone, then he calls his dad with the news, and his mom who keeps asking questions even though he says he has to go, then the hospice worker. The disparity is tremendous: mother sitting calmly with her child while father does, does, does. But, after the frenzy of the phone calls, it is David's turn to sit with his son, while I get up to stretch my arms.

I go to the bathroom, although I don't really need to pee,
but somehow going pee seems away to keep going, to acknowledge that I'm still here after all.

The hospice nurse will arrive in an hour to “pronounce” Silvan, meaning to pronounce him dead, a bureaucratic necessity to guard against burying people alive, I guess. If hospice doesn't do it, we'll have to call 911.

That means for one hour more he is not quite dead.

I take him back from David. The bundle is still warm and I can feel still like a mother with her babe in arms. But he is getting heavier.

The hospice nurse told us from the beginning that one of the things she could do for us at the end is help bathe him. But I'd hoped to do it on my own.

Now David asks if he can help.

We fill the bath, as usual, in the sink. As always, we test the water, making it nice and warm. We set up the soft changing table on the counter, get two clean towels, including one with a hood so his head won't get cold as we're drying him. Then I carry him into the kitchen and put him on the changing table. Undressing him is fine until I get to the diaper and there, after days of no pee, after a month of no poop, is a yellow stain and a tarry plug. I freak.

I say, “I can't do this.” I am thinking of the rest of my dead.

But there is David, he keeps us going. He disposes of the diaper and lifts Silvan's body – now strangely heavy – into the water where his limbs loosen and float.

The sun comes slanting into the kitchen, lighting up the yellow table and walls. I start with his head, just as you are supposed to do with babies, lifting the clean cloth to his eyes. As the water runs into his eyes, the lube and dust coating them melt away and we see them – that green and blue and brown fringed with lustrous lashes. We wash his lips, so full once, now like exquisite etchings, and behind his downy ears; we wash the hair on his head which, in the bright kitchen, shows itself to have hints of red in its brown. We wash his bony chest, the tiny hollows
of his armpits, those delicate fingers. We run the washcloth down the laddered bones of his back, and over his still-soft buttocks and down his long legs to his feet, those tender soles.