Holding Silvan (19 page)

“Here I am,” his picture says from beside my slippers on the closet floor.

“Here I am,” he says floating down before the mirror.

 

THAT FIRST WEEK after he's gone, I barely leave the bedroom. I lie there with his photo album, I close my eyes and dream about him.

Next, I leave the house but only for the yard.

Next, I walk around the neighborhood.

Little by little, I fly farther and farther from the nest.

I try dinner at a restaurant with David. That doesn't go well. Looking at a happy young couple at the next table, I begin to cry. David takes my hand. I cry harder. We must look like we're breaking up and my sobs come harder, thinking no one can see through my grief to the child who has brought us so close together.

Next, I go for a haircut. My haircutter has heard the news from Eve whose job it was to call everyone. She says she is surprised how good I look, considering. “It's because,” I say, “he gave me so much joy.” I have not formulated that thought out loud before and it strikes me as sad; it's as incommunicable as grief, my joy. I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror and it's not joy I see but something more complicated peering out from under my wet hair. I see both pride and ugly shame, and shy hope.

A few days later, I go on a hike with my sister. While we
are gone, someone smashes a window and steals everything in my trunk, including my purse. The policeman who takes the report wants me to list everything I've lost. Nothing I've lost seems to impress him. It was a trunk full of junk, old blankets we kept there in case we needed to sleep at the hospital with Silvan, a breast pumping kit, a coat, a pair of heels. Not even the loss of my purse impresses him, an old ripped cloth bag with an old cellphone in it. In the purse I also had a notebook in which I took some of my notes about Silvan, but this impresses him least of all. Desperate, I say, “And all my photos of my dead son.”

He does not react at all.

When he's gone, I tell my sister I made up that last part about the photos.

She is shocked. “Why would you make that up?”

I shrug. “I wanted him to feel my pain.”

And it's true, I can scarcely keep the pain to myself.

Thinking we're ready, we respond at last to the doula's messages. We invite her to come over. We sit on the sofa and try to tell her the whole story starting from the night she left the hospital. She says, “I'm not a doctor, but…” and tries to blame the doctor for what happened next. When I don't take the bait, she asks if there's anything I regret. Thinking she wants my advice on how to be a better doula, I say I wish I hadn't spent so much time in the shower because I felt Silvan's last kick there.

“Most women love showers,” she says, her face blank. So I give her a check and ask for the photo of Silvan she took at birth. “I had it, but I couldn't bear to look at it,” she says, “so I put it in a drawer and now I can't find it.”

I wait. I want her to say she'll look for it. I want her to treasure Silvan's memory as we do. I resist seeing that, although I have something for her, she has nothing at all for me.

 

HAVING GRIEVED BEFORE – having practiced on flies and old men, having lost a brother, a father, a friend – does not make me immune. It only makes me more patient, perhaps, with the
feeling – the dry mouth, the foggy head, the sense of isolation. I watch myself, bemused, as I tell the man at the shoe store that my son has just died. Next, I try and fail to stop myself from telling the couple with the stroller. I watch their eyebrows shoot up, I hear their flat words of condolence; I see that this is my need, not theirs, but I can't stop. Telling people seems to help.

In late June, the gauze unwinds a little. With relief, I feel the pain of others again; I feel for my friend in New Mexico who tells me at last that her husband has left her; I commiserate with another who's just learned that the treatment of her arthritis may have rendered her infertile.

Tender and exposed, I decide to give up my writing. I decide to give up my teaching, too, and my part-time night job. I will do something more useful. Perhaps I will become a grief counselor and in that way make use of my pain. But the social worker who still visits us from hospice counsels against it. “It's better not to make major life changes while in the midst of grief,” she says.

Meanwhile, I continue writing in my diary. How patient David is with my need. I write frantically in the diary as if Silvan's scent is in the ink, as if I am afraid to let that scent go dry. I fill notebook after notebook, and then, thinking the thicket of my handwriting may repel my return to these pages in the future, I force myself to type them out. Hundreds of typed pages, and still I don't go back to my “real” work.

A colleague calls, wondering if I will return. “I want you to know,” she says, “I agree with your choice. It's natural. Think of birds, they abandon fledglings that don't fly. They do it for the sake of the species.”

I want to agree, but it's not that simple.

There is no one way for a parent to act. Nor is there one way to grieve.

If I can shape Silvan's life and death into a story, I can survive it. If I can hear that I was brave, that I was loving, then the story makes sense. I want confirmation that we have made the right choice. I want the story to fit into the story of my life.
God may never have appeared to me in a shaft of light to tell me what to do, but still there is a voice inside me, a voice that believes Silvan's time has come and gone while the rest of us have to go on living.

 

WE GO ON living with a simple walk around the neighborhood each night after dinner in the safety of dusk. It is July, David has been off work for two months, and now he's back and scrambling to catch up. Margie tells us that at her job she's put Silvan's face up as a screensaver. How moved I am to think that when Margie turns from her desk to pump milk for her own baby, Silvan's face floats up angelic. David's boss, on the other hand, has sent an email to the company asking people not to bother David with personal questions. Though David approved his boss's request, it has been much harder than he imagined. He comes home squashed by the silence.

If only he could talk about Silvan at work, he says, it would feel more natural to be there. If only people would listen. We walk around the neighborhood brimming with our story. At the same time, David is moving on. He wants to buy a car. Though I refuse to shop for a sofa, I concede that our car is on its last legs. I don't oppose his research. It gives him something to focus on.

One night as we stroll, David spots a car of the type he wants. It's a family car, a station wagon, a safe and optimistic choice. He urges me to come and look up close. Peering in with my hands cupped to the passenger window, I see a car seat. I jump back as if singed. The car seat is blue. It is stamped with puppies' feet. It is the exact model we bought for Silvan still boxed in our garage.

“It's not fair,” I say.

“What do you mean it's not fair?” David says, sounding like my father. “We have that exact same car seat.”

We break into morbid laughter.

David takes my hand and kisses it and as we step away from the car, we notice a couple of birds. They hop and trill at
us in shrill staccato. We suspect a baby bird must be nearby but we aren't prepared to find one. There it is, right in front of us on the sidewalk, squashed flat. We stop.

“That's the sound of bird grief,” David finally says.

I nod. We don't know if it's true, but I wish I had the language to comfort them.

I take David's hand again. We walk along, linked.

MY MOTHER POSTPONES RETIREMENT, MY SISTER RETURNS to Brazil, my brother reschedules his wedding from this summer to the following, and I am relieved as if this repetition all around me means that I can remain here circling like a bird in the sky; but at last, David convinces me. Three months ago, we were in the Bad News Room together and I was asking him not to let this ruin our marriage, and he was asking me to have another child again someday; so now we're in that future time together trying to move beyond what feels like the tragic climax of my life. Perhaps there have been other times since Silvan was born, but this is the first sex I remember after him.

It is mid-July. Though some people counsel against getting pregnant again until one has grieved “fully,” I know I will grieve Silvan whether I'm pregnant or not. And anyway, if I want to get pregnant again, my doctor recommends not waiting any longer because of my age and history. So I lie back and David cups the back of my head in his palm. This is how I used to hold Silvan. I close my eyes and, just as I used to confuse my own nose with Silvan's while he was alive, now my whole body is Silvan's body, and David is me, and we are all one, making love, as we were in the moment of Silvan's conception, and I can't do it.

“Stop,” I say.

David stops, but he is disappointed.

“This feels,” I say, “like a betrayal of Silvan.”

David shakes his head. “When will you be ready?” he asks.

I don't know.

 

WHILE WAITING TO know if I can do this, I make the mistake of going to see Claudia and Brian. Their third child has been born and they're having a belated baby shower. I must want to prove to myself that, though they failed to be strong enough for a memorial, I'm strong enough for the optimism of a shower. The women sit around comparing labors. I want to chime in. I want to say, “Mine was sixteen hours,” or “I only needed two stitches” but the end of my story seems to overshadow the joy of its beginning. Everyone avoids my eyes. Then a well-meaning friend leans over and says, “You'll see. The joy when you have your next child will amaze you,” and I wonder what part of my joy in Silvan she has missed.

I accept the little bundled baby being passed around the room. He has the same weight and warmth as Silvan, only this baby is as floppy as a ragdoll. In that moment, I realize how strangely stiff Silvan had been, his brain already failing to show him how to move. I have to hand the baby swiftly on, which is fine because Claudia beckons me into the kitchen. She wants to tell me a story about her neighbor down the street, as if I'm best equipped to deal with this story. She leans in close to tell me how he was lying there in his lawn chair as he usually did but he'd already “passed.”

She says this so softly I'm not sure I've heard right. “You mean he was dead?”

“Shh,” Claudia says. She indicates her older children jumping off the sofa in the next room. “They don't know that word yet.”

I say, “But what about death itself? Surely they know about that?” but she only shrugs vaguely. It's the vagueness that gets me. Though it feels almost as wrong as death to do so, in that moment I let our friendship go. If I'm lucky, I think, someday I'll have children who will know about death. They will puzzle over birds who crash into our windows and lie broken-necked
on the stairs. They will know that chicken comes from chickens and beef from cows. They will study the glassy eyes of fish at the market. Sometimes they will be the ones to kill things themselves and ask if they are really dead. They will keep a pet snail in a cage for too long and when they find it foamy and tucked tight in its shell, they will cry the way I cried over pets as a child and then be relieved when they take it outside to see it revive and creep away into a shelter of dead leaves. They will know that many people I have loved are dead and that the real dead stay dead.

 

THE DOCTORS SAY it's statistically improbable, but once you've been on the wrong end of statistics, statistics don't matter so much. At least not to me. To David, statistics are comforting, which is why he's ready; but even still he has to admit that statistics don't address the heart of the question that remains. Could we let another child die? Even if it's highly unlikely it would happen again, we have to ask ourselves what we would do. Even if we thought it was the right choice before, we're not sure we'd have the strength to endure it again. I've been reading a book about neonatal ethics and stumbled across a palliative care nurse who'd like to establish the equivalent of a living will for babies so that parents who are pregnant start preparing themselves for the possibility of something going wrong. And yet I can see how hard it would be to introduce the topic of death to women like Claudia who seem to have the luxury of separating thoughts of birth from death when it's hard even for us to think about a baby dying.

At the same time as I hesitate, grimly asking myself these questions about birth and death, we've continued doing tests to figure out what happened to Silvan. The autopsy has found nothing wrong with his body. His asphyxiation during labor remains unexplained. It could happen again just as it could happen to anyone. Still, we continue exploring possible reasons that it occurred and that's how my obstetrician comes up with the unexpected results of a genetic mutation that I carry on both sides
of my genes. As a hematologist friend of a friend says (as transmitted to us in a suspect game of telephone), “It's amazing she carried a baby to term at all and survived.”

My doctor sends us to a hematologist for a consultation. He sits on the other side of a shiny desk with his plaque and family photos all around him. He gets out a study, something we've found ourselves online, that talks about my genetic mutation. He reiterates what we know: I have a higher chance not only of stillbirth or dying myself postpartum of a clot, but it's also highly unlikely that a fertilized egg will implant itself in my womb. He's distant and vague about our chances of having a child and I want him to care.