by Mayte Garcia
The OR nurses swooped in and took him. Everyone was talking at once. I heard my husband saying, “He’s not crying. Why is he not crying?” He wasn’t breathing. They whisked him to a table and began frantically working on him. Everything inside me said, Let him go, but someone told me later that they were required by law to revive him.
Suddenly my husband’s face was close to mine. He gripped my hand and said, “It’s going to be okay. He’ll be okay.”
“Oh, God… oh, God…”
We heard him cry. My husband disappeared for a moment. Then he was there again. “It’s a boy. It’s a boy. They got him breathing.”
“Let him go.”
“No. No, we’re going to make it, okay? He’ll be okay.”
They brought our baby over to us. He was curled on his side, gasping shallow little goldfish gulps of air. Because there were no lids to blink, his eyes looked startled and dry. I caught hold of his tiny hand, saying over and over, “Mama loves you. Mama’s here. I love you so much, Amiir. Mama loves you.”
When they came to take him, my husband said, “I’m going with him.”
“Yes. Yes. Go.”
He left. The plastic surgeon came. Someone told me I might need a transfusion. I didn’t want to be away from my son a moment longer than necessary.
“Please,” I said, “unless I’m gonna die die, don’t let them do it.”
There was talk about my mother giving blood, but I didn’t want her to, because I knew she was about to have surgery herself in a matter of days.
I kept pleading, “I need to be with my son. Please, let me go to my son.”
Angela was there with her positive energy. “You’ll see him soon. First, we need to get you stabilized.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes. Mayte, I’m giving you something for the pain. You’re going to get a little sleepy.”
When I closed my eyes, I could feel the plastic surgeon dragging meticulous sutures through the skin on my belly. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the hospital room, and my husband was there, still in his scrubs. He looked so tired, so beaten down, but to me, he’d never been more beautiful. He was Amiir’s father, a protective Papa Bear thinking only of his son. From the first moment of our son’s life to the last, my husband thought nothing of himself. His vanity, his ego, his needs—all that had been stripped away. All that remained was a solid core of unconditional love.
My throat was dry. All I could say was, “Amiir.”
“He’s in surgery again.” He described the procedures one after another. They’d sewn his eyes shut. Intubation. Ventilation. Feeding tube. Colostomy. Exploratory… something. It was impossible to take it all in. “They want you to pump milk so they can feed him.”
“I want to come and nurse him.”
“I don’t want you to see him like this. I don’t want you to see him till they get him stabilized so he can come home with us.” He waited while I pumped and then took the bags of milk. “I’m going back. I’ll stay with him.”
I hit the button for the painkiller drip and closed my eyes again. When I woke up, Daddy was there. He said, “He’s beautiful. Don’t worry.”
Two days later, my husband briefly went home to take a shower. While he was gone, I had someone wheel me down to see my son. I could see that Amiir was crying, but there was no noise, because they were feeding him my breast milk through a tube in his nose and there was another tube down his throat for ventilation. I stood up from the wheelchair and pulled my IV with me over to the incubator. When I reached inside and took his hand, he immediately became calm, and I suddenly felt calm myself. I’d cherished this child when he was inside me, and then he had been ripped away. Pain. Craziness. But now we were breathing the same air again, touching each other.
“I need to hold him,” I said. “Can I hold him without hurting him?”
They took me to a chair. There were so many needles and wires and tubes attached to every part of his body, it took two nurses to lift him into my arms.
“I’m here, Bebo. Mama loves you. I’m your mama.”
His skin was indescribably soft. The joints of his fingers were fused, so he couldn’t grab my finger, but he found a way to fold his little hand around the side of mine, hanging on for dear life. My husband came. I worried that he’d be angry, but he wasn’t. He sat on the floor with his body against my knee, humming and whispering to Amiir, and we stayed that way for hours. I was in pain and fighting to stay awake, but I didn’t want to leave. Finally, the nurses gently insisted. They took the baby, and I let my husband wheel me to my room and help me into bed. Then he went back to be with Amiir. There were more surgeries. He didn’t want our son to be alone through any of it.
Every day something new went wrong or collapsed or presented itself, some new problem was discovered, some existing problem got worse. We spent all the hours we could in our little family corner in the NICU, humming and telling stories, and taking in the softness of his skin and hair, the soft smell of his warm little body, the beauty of his spirit, the shape of his lower lip that was just like Jan’s lower lip.
After six days, he was struggling to breathe, and I said to the doctor, “He’s not leaving here, is he?”
He avoided answering my question. Instead, he talked about more invasive measures, including a tracheotomy.
“No. No, you’re not doing that to him,” I said. “He is suffering.”
He quietly explained to me that if we didn’t allow him to insert this permanent pipe in Amiir’s throat, we were making the choice to let him go, and the more he talked on and on in this cold doctor way, the more hysterical I got.
“You’re torturing him! He can’t live like this!”
My husband pulled me into the next room and tried to calm me down. “Mayte. Mayte, maybe if they do this—if they can get him breathing with the machine—”
“Then what? What else?”
We stood there in the empty room, coming to the same terrible place.
“We have to let him go.”
I wanted to grab the words back as soon as they were out of my mouth. Letting him go meant carving a piece from each of our hearts, but now I was the protective Mama Bear alongside the weary Papa Bear. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt my baby anymore, and I told myself that if we loved him enough to let him go, maybe he’d come back to us. Maybe he would find us, the way we had found each other.
Holding each other tight, we agreed: “If they take him off the machine and he can breathe, we keep fighting. If he can’t live without the machine… maybe he’s not supposed to be here.”
We went back in and spoke quietly with the doctors. They tried to reassure and comfort us, tried to tell us this was the right thing to do, but the rightness of it didn’t make it any less bitter. We signed papers and agreed on a time when life support would be removed the next day. They sent me home with painkillers and Valium, and I crawled into a dark sleep. I woke up every three hours during the night to pump breast milk, and I wanted to go to Amiir, but I was terrified to go there again. When we did, it would be over.
When I woke up again, I heard a phone ringing. A moment later, my husband came and said, “It’s done. They took the tubes out.”
“What? No! I’m supposed to be there!”
“I didn’t know if you could handle it.”
“I’m going. Right now. If no one wants to take me, I’ll drive.”
He put his arms around me. Made me stop. In less time than it would have taken me to get there, the phone rang again. He answered it, and then he hung up and said, “He’s gone.”
I lost it. I went in our room and cried and cried. I don’t know what my husband did. A few hours later, our son’s ashes were brought to the house in an urn with three dolphins on it: mama, daddy, and baby. We spent most of the next day huddled together on the couch, crying, touching each other, expressing complete wonder at this beautiful creature who’d just drifted into our lives and then away again. I kept getting up to pump milk.<
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“You should stop,” he said.
“I can’t.”
My breasts ached, heavy with milk. My hormones were screaming. Every fiber in my body craved the smell of my baby.
I don’t know how long I lay in bed with Amiir’s ashes. All I remember is the hot, hard pain in my breasts and grief as airless and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes I was aware of my husband lying next to me or sitting in a chair, staring at the television. The next day—or maybe it was a few days or a week later or in another lifetime—he came to me and said, “I can’t be here. I have to go.”
He went to play a few gigs and promote the Emancipation album. I stayed in the hollow house, wishing I could die. My breasts felt raw. My nipples started to burn and chafe. The stitches on my belly felt like they were crawling with spiders. I lay on the bed, sweating from fever, shaking from shock and chills. I had an infection. A doctor came. I heard her talking to my husband. Their voices were quiet but tense.
“She needs to go back to the hospital.”
“No. God’s hand is on her. She’ll be fine.”
“If we don’t take care of this, it could cause infertility.”
I sat up and said, “I’m going.”
He didn’t say anything else while I dragged myself up and pulled on pajama pants and a clean shirt.
“Will you come with me?” I asked.
He shook his head, staring straight ahead.
In the hospital, they hooked me to another IV and pumped antibiotics and painkillers into me. The nurses came and put ice on me every two hours. They put salve and compresses on my breasts. After a few days, the pressure subsided, and the milk stopped seeping through the front of my hospital gown. I was sent home.
I sat on the sofa with Mia near the bookshelf that housed the dolphin urn that held Amiir’s ashes. The ashes were everything. Everything was ash.
“Where’s my Vicodin?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll send someone to get you some more.”
Days passed in darkness.
He shook me awake. “Mayte. You have to get up.”
“Why?”
“Oprah’s coming to Paisley. Today. She’ll be there with her crew.”
“No…”
“Yes. You have to do this. You have to get up.”
“Tell her I’m sick. Tell her I can’t.”
“I need you to do this. I told her you’d be with me.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
He had me on my feet, steering me toward the bathroom, but I was sobbing, stumbling. My body felt like it was made of quartz. People came. Lights were turned on. A mask of heavy makeup was applied to my face. A cream-colored suit was put on me.
This must be what it feels like, I thought, when they pretty up a corpse in a funeral parlor.
While I was being prepared, my husband took Oprah on a tour of Paisley Park, and her mission was clear. She’d come to find out if our child was dead or deformed like people were saying, and in retrospect, this would have been a good way to share the truth in a dignified way. Later on, with not much else to fall back on, the producers cut in screenshots of ugly tabloid headlines:
DELIVERY ROOM TRAGEDY FOR PRINCE
Rock star’s baby has horrible birth defect
I think Oprah could have handled it better if we’d let her. God knows she tried, gently prodding my husband for some kind of information as they toured Paisley Park without me. In Studio B, he tried to steer her toward the album that had just dropped, but she said, “‘Sex in the Summer’… the song featured the ultrasound heartbeat of your baby.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he smiled at the memory of that intensely happy day. “What we did was take a microphone and place it on Mayte’s stomach and move it around with the gel till we get the right sound and…” He beat-boxed the sound of Amiir’s chugging little heart. “You know, you start to hear that, and then we put the drums around that.” He played a little snippet from the cassette tape. “That’s the baby.”
“When you heard that sound for the first time,” she said, “what did you think or feel inside yourself?”
“I was pretty much speechless. It really grounds you, makes you realize that things you thought are important aren’t really.”
While I was in the hospital, he had installed a lavishly equipped nursery and playroom at Paisley Park. I hadn’t seen it yet. In fact, I didn’t know anything about that or the huge playground that had been installed outside. He wanted all this to be a surprise for me when we brought Amiir home from the hospital. Oprah saw it before I did. I have to wonder why he took her in there. I suppose it’s possible that on some level he wanted to tell her the truth or at least hoped she’d figure it out on her own and understand why he didn’t want to make a direct statement. They stood in the middle of this colorful paradise of toys and ramps and murals. It had everything a perfect nursery needs, except for the only thing a perfect nursery needs.
“Oh… wow,” she said. “Wow.”
“Here’s my favorite room.”
“For the children to be… the children to come…”
He nodded with great certainty. “Yes, ma’am.”
“The child in you? Or just the children?”
“Oh, the children, yeah.”
“It’s been rumored that your baby boy was born with health problems,” said Oprah. “The reports have fans concerned.”
It was a tactful way to phrase it. Respectful. Compassionate. He just couldn’t go there.
“It’s all good,” he said woodenly. “Never mind what you hear.”
A journalist at heart, she finally asked him directly, “What’s the status of your baby?”
“Our family exists. We’re just beginning it.”
A cryptic answer, but he wasn’t lying. This is what we believed to be true. Believing that was the only thing keeping us going.
I sat on a sofa at Paisley Park, smiling a pretty ballerina smile.
Lights. Camera.
Oprah smiled, too. We both knew our choreography. I sensed her frustration; she had a show to do, but I’d been instructed by my husband: “Say nothing about Amiir.”
She asked about when we met, and my husband told her how he said to Rosie, “There’s my future wife.” That’s such a good story, isn’t it? I giggled and nodded and kept my eyes away from Oprah’s. The woman is no fool. I was clearly no longer pregnant. There was no baby in my arms. The obvious questions seemed to hang in the air, but she was patient. She asked me how I had felt when we met.
“I felt calm. I felt at peace,” I said, and I tried to feel that again in the moment with his arm like a steel safety rail behind my back.
I was surprised to hear him say something about how we’d known each other in past lives—that I was his sister or possibly the same person. These were things I’d said to him while I was in his arms, under his hypnosis.
“Isn’t this all kind of weird?” Oprah said.
I giggled and shrugged, thinking, Girl, you don’t even know.
“Well, it depends on how you look at life,” he said.
She looked at me and said, “When he talks about you, there’s a thing that happens in his eyes.”
I smiled and looked at my hands.
My husband said, “I do feel like I’ve come closer to who I aspire to be by being with her.”
“Really?” said Oprah. “And what does she do for you that you didn’t—that you didn’t have alone?”
“She makes it easier to talk to God.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I could cry,” she said.
But I couldn’t. If I’d let a single tear drop down my cheek, I would have dissolved like the woman in the Bible who turns to salt. I concentrated on my hands. My smile. My ballerina mask while he told her about our small church wedding, how there were only a few people there, adding, “She said she was happy it was empty because it left room for the angels.”
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sp; Another private moment. Something I had said while I was under. On our wedding night. Why would he give that little moment away? I felt it cost me something. Just a penny or so, but… something.
“Is he romantic?” she asked me.
I giggled and nodded. “He’s romantic.”
“I’m thinkin’,” Oprah mugged, “if he ain’t romantic, who is?”
“He’s—he’s very romantic.”
“Like… romantic how?” she nudged. “Like, rose petals in the bed and…?”
He smiled a teasing smile and started to raise his hand to my face the way he always did when he hypnotized me. I gracefully but firmly took hold of his wrist and brought his forearm down to my lap.
Not that. I was not giving that away for a penny. Not today.
We were here to do business. Fine. Keep it about the business. I laughed lightly and said, “For me, the most romantic thing he’s done is write all these beautiful songs for me.”
“Mm-hmm?” She raised her eyebrows, pleased that I was finally saying something. And maybe there was something I wanted to say. Maybe this was the moment to stop choking it down. Honestly, the whole thing is a foggy mess in my mind now, but maybe I wanted to offer him that opportunity without kicking through his need to control the information.
“You know,” I said, “‘Let’s Have a Baby’—because of that—I mean… I got pregnant.”
He smiled a tight smile, his lips clamped shut.
After the interview, I left them at Paisley Park to do B-roll or whatever they were going to do. I didn’t want to hear about it and never watched the show until much later. During part of it, he’s wearing that “Holy River” bolero he wore at our wedding. He wore it for me, I understood later on, but at the time, I didn’t notice.
I went home, took Amiir’s ashes from the shelf, and crawled back into bed. I cried until I slept and slept until I woke up crying. I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t recognize my own skin. My eyes were the empty eyes of a plastic doll. In my hand was the bottle of Vicodin. I filled a glass with wine and tapped the pills into the palm of my hand. First one. Then three. Then the whole bottle. I studied them, planning how to swallow them all without the bitter taste making me vomit. I decided to move to the bedroom. I didn’t know how long it would take. Better to lie down and not be found on the bathroom floor. I sat on the edge of the bed and raised my hand to my mouth.