by Bill Heavey
There was one more call to make. Lan had to be told. I got her about ten o’clock. She seemed happy to hear from me. “How’s the baby?” she asked brightly. “Lan, I have bad news,” I said. I told her to sit down. I told her just as the firefighter had told me: Lily had stopped breathing at daycare, the ambulance, the doctors working on her, that she had died. I heard gasping for breath on the other end of the line. “Lan, is there anybody there with you? Any friends?” She said there weren’t. I asked if she wanted me to come down. Five minutes later, I was headed her way. I stayed for the better part of an hour in her tiny apartment with the two children lying on the bed. She didn’t let them know what had happened. She left the door open and people from the apartment filtered by in the hall, talking among themselves in Vietnamese but not coming in. I had no idea what they were saying, but I could imagine it well enough: You see. Give your baby to one of them and it dies. I tried to comfort Lan, telling her that Lily hadn’t suffered, that no one understood why some babies simply stopped breathing in their sleep and died. After about an hour, I found myself back out on the very same sidewalk as on Easter morning. It was after midnight. There were knots of people moving about in the shadows, cars cruising slowly by. I drove back to Arlington. Molly had gone to sleep. Jane and I held each other and took turns crying. I drank rum and tonic until I couldn’t stay awake any longer.
The next morning Olivia called early. “Everything’s okay, but Mom and Dad’s house burned down this early this morning,” she said. “I didn’t want you to hear it on the television news.” I realize now that she had chosen her tone carefully, the way you do with anybody in shock, so as not to upset them further. Surprisingly, it worked. The house my parents had lived in for thirty-five years was mostly cinders? Most of what they owned up in smoke? No big deal. At least they weren’t dead. I found out later that a passing newspaper carrier had seen the fire, which had apparently been started by some faulty wiring in the basement that took decades to burn through its insulation—and just happened to finish the job about fourteen hours after Lily’s death. The man had thrown rocks at the bedroom window, waking my father and almost certainly saving my parents’ lives.
Initially, still too stunned to take in new information, I accepted the destruction of the house I’d grown up in as a minor distraction, sort of like losing your credit cards. A baby’s death, a house fire the same night. The surreal was suddenly becoming commonplace. These things are supposed to run in threes, I thought. What was next? A swarm of locusts picking out our house from all the others in the block? Close enough, as it turned out.
Flowers began to arrive. The phone rang as the news spread about Lily. Then the police showed up. The Arlington detective asked if he could come in, then told us that Hien, the woman running the daycare home where Lily died, had had thirty-six children in the place. Thirty-one children were in the basement; five infants were in the room with Lily. She was licensed for no more than five children. “These people, they come over here and get used to nice things,” the detective said. “Sometimes, they get greedy.” He told us Hien said she had put Lily down in a portable crib for a nap and checked back on her once in ninety minutes. They had raided her house, removing even her son’s computer to look for evidence, yanked her license, and shut her down. She was being charged with violating state licensing rules and taking money under false pretenses. There might be more charges later.
The whole thing stank. She had lied to us. She’d told us she never took more than two infants and there were six in the room, plus all the kids downstairs. Jane and I had never asked Hien exactly how many kids she took care of, a ludicrously obvious question in hindsight. It flashed through my mind that her neglect might have led to Lily’s death. But if she was guilty of neglect, then so were we for having hired her. And it definitely seemed like the cops were out to get her, in no small part simply because she was Vietnamese. I was angry at Hien for lying, the police for their bigotry, myself for trusting her so readily.
The detective told us that although Hien had too many kids for her license, she did have the proper number of helpers. He asked some follow-up questions, told us he’d be in touch, and left. After he left, Jane was quick to defend Hien. I was less convinced. I felt she at least she had lied to us about the number of infants she took in. Who knew what else she might be lying about?
The funeral was held on Saturday, just three days after Lily’s death, at the Unitarian Church in Arlington. I put aside my lifelong fear of speaking in public to bid my daughter goodbye, but didn’t know how to say it. I was raised Episcopalian but it never really took. Jesus and I are still looking for each other. Instead, I called my old yoga teacher, Victor, who runs Shanti Yoga in Bethesda, Maryland. Over the past ten years, I’ve taken lessons from him off and on and come to regard him as a sort of unaccredited holy man. He said he would write something that I could adapt as I saw fit. I don’t know that I believe Victor’s take on the cosmos any more than the church’s, but I trust him. Standing before several hundred people and trying to breathe, I knew I would break down as soon as I started talking. But I no longer cared. I unfolded my notes and read my teacher’s words:
“Lily didn’t stay long on this earth. Certain beings need only a brief time here to complete their work before moving on to a higher place, a place from which they will both continue their own journey upward and help those who stay behind. I believe that Lily was, and is, such a soul.
“The relationship that Lily formed with those who loved her is an ongoing one. Those bonds of love created a channel of communication that never closes. I believe the departed soul of this child is making a great effort to soothe the pain of those left behind. Her compassion compels her to stay close to those who loved her so strongly and to help them through this time. The compassion of such souls is so great that they will do this even if it means inhibiting their own soul’s upward journey.
“Let us return her sacrifice by releasing her spirit and not hindering her journey with our suffering. Let us draw on our courage and faith in God to overcome our pain. I ask us all to take a moment to open our hearts and imagine Lily’s soul entering the holy assembly of spirits, those beings who vibrate with a love so pure as to be inaccessible to human experience. Let us give thanks to her and all those involved in her time on earth for allowing us to partake in her miraculous journey.”
Jane spoke. Molly spoke. A minister spoke. Two hundred people, more than I had ever imagined would show up, stood in silence as a violinist played “Over the Rainbow.” It was a beautiful moment, the instrument’s clear tones ringing through the church, the melody searching for a way up and out of this world. I had thought I was all cried out. That violin found a whole new reservoir of tears.
In the days and weeks after Lily’s death, Jane and I paced mechanically through our lives, stopping several times a day to cry, while Lily’s ashes, amounting to a single handful, rested in a blue urn on the mantel. Jane seemed more tortured by doubts and “if onlys” than I was, turning over in her mind all the things that we might have done differently: kept the baby at home until she was older even if it meant going into debt, hiring someone to come to the house when needed instead of taking Lily out for daycare. It’s hard to elude the belief—however false—that you might have somehow saved your child if you’d only been there. Jane recalled playing with Lily on her bed for the better part of an hour that final morning. She remembered telling Lily she’d never met a more charming baby.
For whatever reasons, I escaped the worst of this cycle of second-guessing. The separation had been so swift, random, and horrifying that it seemed—at least in the way insurance companies use the term—an act of God. To apportion blame or wonder what might have been done differently supposed a rational universe, a place where there were reasons for Lily’s death. But making sense is not among the universe’s higher priorities. Its workings are hidden, perhaps random, and Lord help you if you get in its way. I
imagined Lily’s short life as a plane coming in for a landing on an aircraft carrier in rough seas. My father had often told me that when a pilot sets his craft down for a carrier landing and finds that he’s not going to make it, his best option is to power up, take off again, and circle around for another attempt. Maybe that’s what Lily had done: come down to earth for a landing and taken off again just as we thought she’d come to rest in our arms. Maybe she was up there right now looking for a safe place to land. I didn’t believe it. But it comforted me to imagine it that way.
Life went on. The paper landed on the lawn every morning, the dog still hurled herself at front door when the mail lady opened the storm door, the shouts of the kids at the Catholic school across the street still penetrated our walls. It was then I realized that just as the world was oblivious to my loss, so had I been oblivious to others’ losses until Lily’s death. How many faces had I blithely passed on the street who were inwardly unmoored by the recent loss of a child, wife or husband? They had always been there, peering back at me from that parallel universe of loss. I just hadn’t seen them. And now I was one of them. Every morning I woke and moved once more through my own life like a ghost.
I went fishing a lot that summer. I would drive up to Violette’s Lock on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal out past Potomac, Maryland, and wade the river with a spinning rod for smallmouth bass. My hands were practiced at the motions—tying on a lure, casting, retrieving—and I was content to let them. Wading deep into the water, I fished in 100-degree heat and in lightning storms, half hoping that a stray volt would arc down my graphite fishing rod. Whenever I caught a fish, bringing it up into the world of air before releasing it, I wondered if this was what dying was like, passing from the world where you could breathe to one you couldn’t. Only maybe death was the discovery that you finally could breathe there after all. What was life that made it different from death? What slender thing separated the lively baby I’d known from the doll in the emergency room? It did seem that her tiny spark must live on somehow, that matter may be changed but not destroyed. Maybe it had been absorbed into one of the lightning bolts I was half wishing would come my way. Maybe it was just circling. Out on the river, I began to talk to Lily. I told her how much I missed her and loved her and that I hoped she was safe. That I would always be with her. I felt the water sliding past my legs. At dusk, birds came out to wheel and loop in the heavy air to catch insects. No lightning came near me that summer.
Jane and I never resolved our fundamental difference about Hien. For whatever reason, Jane forgave her totally and almost instantly. She said that Hien was nearly as devastated by the loss as we were, that she had complied with the spirit—if not the letter of the law—by having the proper number of helpers, and that a zealous Arlington prosecutor might well want to make an example out of her. She pointed out that Lily might just as easily have died in our own home, in which case she and I would be blaming each other. All of this was true. But I felt that Hien had misled us, if not lied outright, about the number of infants. And I couldn’t get past the fact that we had entrusted our daughter to her care and Lily had died in her care. Some ancient code had been violated. Maybe I felt Jane was being compassionate enough for the two of us. Maybe I’d simply allowed my anger and grief to harden my heart. I’d taken my lumps, I thought bitterly. She could take hers.
There was one thing Jane and I did agree on. We still wanted a baby. I think we decided that almost before the funeral home had turned Lily’s body to a fistful of ash. We agreed not to start for at least a few months, maybe longer. But we knew if we didn’t get back up on the horse soon, we might not have the courage to try again. And then we’d spend the rest of our lives looking back at what might have been had Lily lived. I knew she was irreplaceable. I was terrified of again being responsible for the life of another child. But I needed some kind of hope in my life. And somewhere, there had to be a baby who needed us. Then Jane said something I will never forget. “Someday, we’ll look back at this and realize that we had to go through Lily’s death to find the baby we’re supposed to be with.” I loved her for saying that.
Some weeks after the funeral, I heard about the Northern Virginia SIDS Alliance from a woman who had a daughter on Molly’s soccer team and whose sister was president of the chapter. “You might want to give them a call,” she told me. I did. A few days later, Judy Rainey knocked on the door, introduced herself, and handed me an envelope. She was backing away almost as soon as she had come. (I thought she was being careful not to intrude; much later I found out she was late for an appointment.) Her number was in the envelope, she said. I could call anytime. Inside was The SIDS Survival Guide, a book filled with the raw stories of parents who had lost babies and their struggles through horror, anger, and grief to acceptance.
It helped to know that other people had been through the nightmare and come out the other side. There was advice from grief counselors, chapters on planning the funeral, chapters on the different ways men, children, and grandparents deal with the death. There was one about being a friend to a SIDS survivor (do use the baby’s name; don’t say it was God’s will; do say “I can’t even begin to imagine your pain”) and even one called “When a Baby Dies at the Child Care Provider’s.”
I wanted to talk to Judy again, to someone who had taken her own tour of the universe of loss. Jane, Judy, and I finally went out to lunch one day. Judy apologized for bringing along Sarah, her ten-month-old. Some SIDS parents can’t bear to see another’s child. But we were hungry for a baby’s smile, any baby’s. Over pizza, Judy told us about her son, Joe, who had died in 1996. Like Lily, he had died at his babysitter’s. And like me, Judy had her own unresolved issues about the sitter. Because she worked right across the street, Judy had arrived at the house within five minutes of getting the call that Joe had stopped breathing. But for some reason, the woman hadn’t dialed 911. Judy had been the one to do that. “I don’t blame her for Joe’s death. But I never understood why she didn’t call for help sooner. And I’ve never really found out why.”
I don’t remember much of our conversation, but I remember feeling tremendously comforted to be in the company of someone who understood my isolation, the fear that I would never get over Lily’s death. I told her how waking each morning was like the movie Groundhog Day, her death happening all over again. I’d gotten used to suddenly tearing up in public places. I could now do it over lunch and not even look around to see how people seated two feet away were reacting.
Judy was eager to hear everything about Lily: how we’d found her, how strangers would see her smile from forty yards out in a supermarket or playground and come over to make her acquaintance. She told us how she and her husband, Terry, had also been terrified to have another child, but had been even more terrified not to. “My arms just ached for a baby,” she said. She’d been so fearful of SIDS by the time Sarah came along that even at ten months, the child was still sleeping strapped into a car seat placed inside her crib so that she couldn’t turn onto her stomach in the night. Judy, the unpaid president of the Northern Virginia SIDS Alliance and a dynamo of a woman, was on a crusade to save as many babies from SIDS as possible. She told us the “Back to Sleep” campaign had helped reduce SIDS 40 percent since 1992, but that less than half of all parents knew that putting a child down on her back reduced the risk of death. That a child accustomed to being put down on her back who was put down prone at daycare was something like eighteen times more likely to die of SIDS. That though SIDS is not totally preventable, thousands of children could be saved simply by getting parents, daycare providers, and grandparents to put them down on their backs and remove from cribs the fluffy bedding and bumper pads that babies can nose their way into and suffocate in.
“All I can tell you is that you will get through this, it will get better,” she said. “But don’t listen to anybody who tells you it’s going to take a year or eighteen months. It takes however long it takes.”
Hien’s case finally came to trial in January. She had pled guilty to three misdemeanor charges, including exceeding the Arlington County limit on children at a family daycare home and not reporting all the income she had made. Jane attended the trial. I did not. I just wanted it all to go away. I read in the paper that dozens of parents showed up to try to convince the judge that she should not be sent to jail. One mother said that Hien had saved her child’s life by administering CPR during a seizure. Another showed a special chair that Hien and her husband had made for her disabled child. “Sometimes we think [she] did a better job than we did,” a lawyer who left his daughter in her care said. Jane did not speak at the trial, but she had agreed to let Hien’s attorney point out privately to the judge that she was in the courtroom and didn’t hold Hien responsible for our child’s death. The judge ruled that there was most likely nothing she could have done to save Lily. He upheld the suspension of her license and gave her probation on the charges she’d pled guilty to. After the ruling, Jane said Hien’s mother, a tiny woman, came over, stood before her, and made a deep, wordless bow of thanks. I realized later that I should have been there. Not necessarily in support of Hien, but to support my wife. I’d let my anger blind me to the person who needed me most.