Holding Silvan (7 page)

“How do you know the prognosis is right?” she asks first.

We tell her we can't know for sure, but for us to gamble otherwise seems unfair to Silvan.

“And what if someone else were willing to care for him?”

“Like you?”

“Like me,” she says, “though I don't how long I'll still be alive.”

“If I thought he should be kept alive, I would do it. He's my son.”

“Of course he is,” she says.

“If Daddy were here,” I say, “he would agree with this choice.” Kim and my mother both looked startled by this entry of the dead, but it feels just right to me. Here comes my father, deep with feeling but strong and calm. If only he were here, he and my mother could go home together and talk this out together. Instead, I explain on his behalf. “You and Daddy always said you'd never want to live as vegetables.” Kim looks surprised. I suppose that, being ten years younger than me, by the time he was ready for adult conversation at the dinner table, the topic was no longer Karen Ann Quinlan and the line between life and death; or the conversations he remembers are the ones that have been useful to him as an adult. As with all siblings, our stories of growing up in the same family are different. Or perhaps it's simpler than that. Perhaps additional dead family is more than he can handle right now.

“But that was
us
,” my mother says now. “
We
wouldn't want to live that way.”

“So why should Silvan have to?”

She looks abashed.

“You could even say God called him and we are preventing him from going,” I say. “After all, he was revived after birth. Maybe that was playing God when God really wanted him to die then. In fact, he's been revived several times. He keeps trying to die and we're preventing him.”

“You could say that,” she says, but she still looks worried. She chews her nails so loudly I can hear it across the room. I say, “Stop chewing your nails,” and she looks up startled, then laughs. She takes her duty to do good very seriously but she does not take herself too seriously. David thinks this means she
will eventually laugh at her own “neurosis” about Silvan's soul, but I don't. I know that if she can't save Silvan's life with prayer, she will at least want to save his soul.

THAT AFTERNOON, I CALL FATHER B FROM HOME WHILE David stays at the hospital with Silvan. What we are doing for Silvan feels compassionate, what we are doing is not euthanasia, but I wonder if my mother feels the distinction. This is important because I know the Catholic Church agrees with the government: it is against euthanasia. I know this with all the visceral weight of discovering it on my own, one foggy afternoon in San Francisco when I was in high school. For some reason, I had chosen euthanasia as my topic for a school report. Because of Karen Ann Quinlan and those dinner table conversations, I knew there was controversy about what Quinlan's parents had done. I thought what they had done was euthanasia. I assumed this meant the church was for it and the legal system against it and I was feeling righteous about the church's loving stance. Certain of my case, I set out after school for the Catholic bookstore to research my topic. A middle-aged woman in a gray cardigan helped me to a slim pamphlet, and back out on the street, I caught my bus where the only thing I gleaned from the dense pages was the Church's condemnation of what I'd thought they would champion. I sat there in my itchy, wool school uniform in shock. The church was against what I thought of as linked with only positives: compassion, acceptance of the inevitability of death. In my dictionary, the first definition seemed to agree. “An easy death,” the dictionary said, as if anyone could argue against that.

I soon had a chance to argue the issue beyond the abstract,
to experience its true complexity. A girl in the youth group I attended Sunday nights at my church had an accident and fell into an irreversible coma and her parents chose to remove her from life support. At the end of the week, the breathing tube would be removed. The novitiates who ran the youth group presented this as a reasonable and loving option, a Catholic option, and this confused me. Hadn't I just done a school report in which I had to say that the church was against euthanasia? I still hadn't understood the distinction between euthanasia and allowing someone to die. Even more confusing was the fact that until this day, I'd never liked this girl. Kirsten had swishy blond hair, giggled constantly, and attracted every boy in the room while never once looking at me. But hearing she might die, I wondered if God were testing me. Perhaps Quinlan's parents had been wrong after all, perhaps Kirsten's parents were wrong. Perhaps the church was wrong. Perhaps they had all lost faith in the miracles of saints.

The week Kirsten was in her coma I struggled towards the peak of my religious faith. I wondered if this was God calling me at last. Each night in bed, I ran through my fantasy: running past hospital security, reaching Kirsten's bed, putting my healing hands on her. But always I felt the same discomfort when she opened her eyes. If I didn't even like her, how could I hope to heal her better than the parents who loved her? At last the day came, life support was removed, Kirsten died. That night, we gathered in youth group with unusual solemnity. Kirsten's peals of laughter were absent. We gathered in a great circle with the lights off and passed a candle from hand to hand. In that golden silence, we could hear each other breathing and I understood. The call I'd felt was not the call of God after all. It had been the call of guilt, the call of vanity, whereas here in this room was real love. Kirsten's parents had made this choice because they loved her. And as I had this humble thought, the candle reached me and something beautiful happened. I felt Kirsten's soul and my soul joining and rising up towards God together.

Thinking to preserve this heady sense of souls in union, I
wrote to the Bishop of Oakland and asked to be confirmed early into the Church. I was fifteen and didn't want to have to wait until his next visit to our parish two years later. I'd felt God's presence, I told him in my letter. But the Bishop was busy. He wasn't impressed with my plea. And two years later, as I lay on the rug in a little room off the sacristy during confirmation class listening to an old priest drone on about the Holy Spirit, it occurred to me that this beautiful thing – this Jiminy-Cricket-like conscience that would sit on my shoulder as a stand-in for God, part of his mysterious trinity, to help me choose right from wrong – was something only a priest could confer through the sacrament of confirmation, and I didn't like that fact. “That's right,” the priest said when I asked him to confirm this. Dignified and silly, the priest rocked back and forth on his heels, hands resting on the round belly beneath his cassock, and he seemed too ordinary an intermediary between me and the transcendent love I yearned for.

Father B, on the other hand, is a priest I like. Father B is smart, reasonable, kind. He is no longer a priest at our parish – I'm no longer a member of any parish – but he has a long history with our family. He came up to the house when Mark died, he conducted the “laying on of the hands” when my father was first ill, he blessed our wedding rings. Even David likes Father B. My mother thinks that if Father B had conducted my confirmation class, I'd still be a member of the church. I don't know if this is true, but I do know that removing life support is an uncomfortable act, and I sense Father B will be able to speak about it to my mother in a way that is supportive. Mostly, I want him to talk to her about heaven. After all, my mother has turned in torment to Father B with questions about Mark's soul. People who commit suicide are guilty, the church believes, of a sin as grave as murder, punishable by hell; our modern understanding of mental illness has only just begun to soften that condemnation. And yet Father B has told my mother that Mark is in heaven. If Father B has said this about Mark, surely he must believe that an unbaptised baby will go there as well. Despite Saint Augustine's
condemnation of such babies to limbo, the church must generally be softening in favor of a heaven more comforting to grieving parents. But Father B surprises me. When I tell him I am calling on behalf of my mother, he says, “Do I sense that a part of you is worried about Silvan's soul, too?”

 

“IS THERE?” DAVID asks me now. I am back at the hospital and we are standing over Silvan's little bed together. Our hands run over his body as if our constant touch is as necessary to keep him here as his blood's circulation, or his breath. I have just told David about my conversation with Father B. “Is a part of you worried about his soul?”

“Oh, no,” I say, “If there's a heaven, all souls go.” I don't know if I believe in heaven anymore, let alone souls; and as I say it, I realize I have not even prayed for Silvan yet. What happened to my need for prayer? When I was young, I used to pray for everything. When Mark was ill, I prayed. When my father was ill, I prayed. But after that? After all those prayers went unanswered? I am here with Silvan, standing over his bed, simply trying to accept that he too will die, and that life will go on without him.

“So what did you tell Father B?”

“I told him I'm worried about my mother.”

David nods. “And what did Father B say?”

“He said he can tell my mother what he tells lots of grandparents in this situation. She can baptize Silvan herself, just with water, or even by desire alone, that she doesn't even have to tell us.”

I feel such relief, but David is horrified. “Silvan's Jewish.”

“But if you don't even believe in baptism,” I say, “who cares? It's just a little water.” I can even picture the water, in a little plastic bottle from the trip to Lourdes when I was young, saved in a back corner of the kitchen cabinet all these years. Though nothing in me needs Silvan baptized, it's easy for me to imagine how much someone might still need to believe. This is my mother's way of caring.

“But why do it if it's just water? What does it matter?” he asks.

“It matters to
her
.”

“But it's so illogical, it's so obviously made up,” David says.

“But if it's made up,” I say, “why do you even care? ”

 

SHORTLY AFTER THIS conversation, Sister C shows up at Silvan's bedside. Now it's David who has gone home, to return the messages building up on our answering machine; and I am alone with Silvan. He's wearing only a diaper under his heat lamp, and I admire the frog-like spread of his chubby legs, the crow's-foot of wrinkles raying out from his armpit, the little starfish hand that I hold in mine. Though Sister C is the “non-denominational” chaplain for the hospital and wears lay clothes, she is obviously a Catholic nun. Exhausted perhaps from all these conversations, from this struggle between my mother and my husband about something that matters so little to me, my first response to her is to echo David. “My son is
Jewish
.” I'm startled by my own vehemence. What does this even mean for a comatose newborn? Perhaps I'm afraid that she will try to interfere with our decision; that she will appeal to the side of me that once yearned for sainthood; remind me of my namesake Saint Monica who spent her life praying for the soul of her sinful son Augustine; make me feel bad about my soul and the soul of my own son. Or perhaps I'm just being loyal to my husband. I keep hold of Silvan's hand.

Sister C smiles. “So he's Jewish. I'm still wondering if there's anything I can do for you or for him.”

With her question, I understand why she's here. She's here to relieve suffering. And so I beg her, gesturing with my free hand, “Take care of my mother. She's Catholic like you. She's out in the hall saying her rosary. She wants to baptize him.”

Already I am turning away with relief.

“Is that all?” Sister C asks. “Nothing for you?”

But I have returned to Silvan, to his little body, here and now.

FOR NOW, SILVAN LIES ASLEEP AS USUAL, THREADED with tubes and wires and the medical tape that holds it all in place. He is five days old, and nothing has changed. We have a plan, but Dr. A still wants us to wait, as if we ourselves might change. Silvan has not opened his eyes since his first night of life; a fat tube in the mouth helps him breathe; thin tubes give him fluids and medicine. To help us hold him, nurses transfer him with all his equipment onto a pillow, and then pass the pillow to us. For all of this, Silvan seems sweetly asleep. He has the flushed cheeks and lips of a baby who has just finished nursing. He keeps his two little fists curled up, one on either side of his face, the way I do sometimes in bed because I find it comforting. I watch him lying calmly on a pillow in my brother Kim's lap.

Now at last when we have made our decision, there is time just to mother Silvan.

At the next bed, a mother and grandmother of a baby who is ready to go home sit silent as always, taking turns feeding and burping their baby. They seem self-conscious about speaking to him in the silly way that people usually speak to babies. The only words they speak are to each other. Perhaps they will be less self-conscious once they get him home alone but I doubt it. Although they were told weeks before that he was ready, the mother is afraid. Afraid that he will choke on his food at home and die. Perhaps he is brain damaged too. I smile at them and turn to my baby who will never go home.

With Silvan on Kim's lap, I find I can reach his little face through his equipment more easily than I can when he's on my own. I bend to kiss his forehead, then his nose, then the space by his ear that is free of medical tape. And then I cannot stop. I kiss the front of his neck below the breathing tube, those warm wrinkles, and the side of his neck, so smooth, so smooth, and his shoulder, and the creases at the edge of his armpit and across his naked sternum and down towards his belly button, all the while making smacking noises, eating him up.