Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  “Here’s the baby; here’s the heartbeat,” the ultrasound technician said, unable to meet my eyes. Then she fled, leaving her clipboard and her glasses behind. “I’m going to give it to you straight,” Dr. Doogie Howser said as he walked in, looking at the ultrasound projected on the wall. My beautiful baby in silhouette, floating in her grainy gray shadow world, the mysterious not-knowing, not-known world, the sound of her heartbeat playing loudly, soothingly, reassuringly, like something that will never stop.

  “Okay,” I chirped. It was going to be fine.

  He started to talk, quickly, like someone wanting to be finished, and it was this quality that I noticed before I really heard or took in the words. The upshot was that Daphne was doomed. There was no way. Well, there were extraordinary measures, but the chances that those would save her were heartbreakingly, sickeningly slim. And the risk to me was tremendous. Infection, high blood pressure, death. Daphne was dying inside my body, and simply too premature and too unhealthy to survive outside, even in one of the world’s best NICUs. His voice went on, quiet and quick, urgent, firm, a voice that was reasoned even as it said unreasonable, insane, and impossible things. There isn’t going to be a baby. She wasn’t really waving at you in that ultrasound last week. You didn’t want her and then you changed your mind and now you can’t have her.

  I said No, intending just to cut him off, to say No, wait, what about, to steer him to another way of understanding it, to lead him to the part of the room or the sentence or the idea where Daphne was fine and everything was just fine, to the place where broken things can be salvaged and put back together. But I must have been screaming instead of talking, because the doctor beside him said, “Oh my God,” very softly and put her face in her hands, and then she reached over to turn on the light and the room was garish and antiseptic, and there was no way to hide from anything. No more grainy, beautiful shadows, no baby Rorschach to watch, to be lulled by, to follow to another place.

  Sometimes women wanted to have labor induced and then deliver the unviable fetus, the doctor was saying, and some wanted “to let nature take its course” and expel the fetus . . . “Are they crazy?!” I demanded of no one in particular, cutting him off. But Doogie Howser seemed to think I really wanted to know, and he said, “Well, some women find that, for closure, they want to go through the process, and see the—”

  I cut him off again. “How big is she?” I demanded and he said, “We don’t really . . .” but I urgently needed to know this now and I practically shrieked, “How big is she? Tell me how much she weighs!” and so he made an estimate and I began sobbing again, but it was an easy decision, now that I knew. She was someone to me, and I could not wait and let her dwindle away into nothing; it could not be a slow, fading good-bye like that for my baby. I noticed now that my husband’s eyes were closed, and he kept them that way for a long time as I stared at him. Daphne was kicking a lot now, and when I looked down I noticed how absurdly, extremely pregnant I looked for someone just into her sixth month. Because I am small, and because this was the third baby, I had popped early, and looked much farther along than I was, and it was, in that moment, unbearable to contemplate the huge nothingness that had opened up in the very spot where there had been a body that changed and grew, plans, a newly decorated room, a baby.

  Letting nature take its course, the doctor was saying, could take a few days, and now I knew what people meant when they wrote or said that they felt cornered “like a wild animal.” I was trapped, crouched in a spot that was getting smaller, and I used my words to try to push my way out, but it was hard to talk—the words came out like breaths and gasps, and I was angry at myself for that.

  “She isn’t in pain,” Doogie Howser was saying now, “and you didn’t do anything wrong.” And when I asked him, “How do you know? How do you know it isn’t my fault?” he grimaced and closed his eyes for a moment, and then he opened them and said, “Because I know. I just know it’s not your fault.” Something had pierced his expression, it seemed, as he said it—he was suddenly a person talking to another person, trying to coax her back into the world.

  I stayed alone in the hospital the night before the surgery, insisting that my husband needed to be at home with our children. Since I was in the labor-and-delivery area of the hospital, I heard babies crying as I slept. I jerked awake again and again, realizing I was in the hospital where I had given birth to my children, thinking I had to get my baby, that it was my little girl who was wailing nearby.

  Dr. Doogie Howser would do the surgery, and he came by the next day in the morning to tell me, somewhat sheepishly, that it was scheduled for 3:00 p.m. He was sorry for the delay, he said, and then he looked at what I was reading and we chatted a little about Henry James. And then I waited, first alone and then with my husband, talking and doing nothing. I couldn’t eat, but I didn’t want to. Daphne was kicking so hard, fluttering so much, that you could see it through the hospital gown I was wearing. The doctors explained that this had to do with the amniotic fluid seeping away. To me, that sounded a lot like she was suffocating. I kept telling her, in my head and aloud, that I was sorry, and that it wouldn’t be long now. At one point I turned to my husband and said, “We’ve had some good times,” something I always say to him when something terrible is happening, and he smiled.

  I thought I was okay as they wheeled me into the OR, which really does look dramatic in the same way it does in television shows when they do those shots from the perspective of the person being wheeled in. I was fine until we got inside, where it was hushed and very somber with bright lights, and everyone was in their green scrubs and masks and shower caps, and they started to transfer me from the gurney to the operating table—is that what it is called?—and Daphne fluttered and kicked, and in spite of or because of the fact that they had told me this was happening because nearly all the amniotic fluid was gone and she could not survive, it felt so pathetic that I said something like, Please hurry, I can’t stand it, she’s kicking so much. I noticed a nurse crying—she was wearing a pink surgical mask—and then Doogie Howser was holding my hand and talking to me. He asked me if I had anything surprising, like piercings, that he should know about, and I laughed and we talked about all the surprises he had had along these lines. He kept holding my hand for a long time, which was at once awkward and reassuring, like a date almost, but a date with someone who is about to perform a surgical procedure on your dying baby because she doesn’t have a chance in hell and you can’t sit around and wait to expel her. I asked the anesthesiologist what she was going to give me and she said, “Something to make you go to sleep,” and Doogie Howser rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t think you know what we’re dealing with here. Tell her exactly what you’re giving her and exactly how much.” She did—it was some kind of benzodiazepine—and I remember telling her that I wanted her to give me the maximum dosage, so I would be completely out, gone, but to make sure that I didn’t die from anesthesia. And I wanted clean lines, I managed to say as I was going under; I had children and I didn’t need to die of some stupid, entirely preventable infection.

  Afterward my OB was there, and my husband, and we chatted and then Dr. Doogie Howser came in, probably to get a sense of how I was doing. He said hello and asked, “Do you remember what we talked about after the surgery, when you were waking up?” I opened my eyes very wide, feeling alarmed, wondering, searching. I had no idea. “Was it anything we can’t repeat in front of my husband?” I ventured, and everyone laughed except Doogie Howser, and then eventually he left the room and I was left wondering what the hell I had said. What had I said? To this day I wonder what I said; to this day my response to losing Daphne is to wonder what the hell I said to Dr. Doogie Howser in the moment I was swimming out of the blackness. The anxious, nagging worry is a black cord that connects me to him, and to her.

  The doctors had all said “the pregnancy” and “the fetus” when we discussed what was happening and everything that could not be done. The fetus could not be save
d. The doctors could not take any steps to prevent this stillbirth of the fetus. It could not be turned back or turned around or stopped. The fetus was unviable. Then, the social worker who came after “the surgery” called her “the baby.” This sharp and sudden semantic shift was presumably intentional. Shut down the mother in your brain so you can have the procedure. Open up the mother in your brain now that she is dead and disposed of so you can mourn. The way we always have for the forever in which we’ve lost our babies. The social worker asked if I wanted a funeral and I said no. Doogie Howser had already asked, and told me that if we didn’t, she would have a “hospital burial,” explaining that basically she would be dispensed of as medical waste. “Which she isn’t,” he was quick to add, and I said, “Well, I guess she is,” since we hadn’t been able to donate any stem cells or use her tissues in any other way. Now the social worker asked if I wanted a memorial box. It had a baby hat inside, she explained, and the death certificate, and a little hand and footprint, and I grimaced, I think, feeling that was outrageous somehow, and ridiculous. I imagined what I might do with such a box. Shove it into a dark spot high in a closet? Put it in the storage unit? What? We talked about how I felt singled out—who the hell loses the baby just into the sixth month? You feel safe after twelve weeks; who knew? And why?—and she pointed out that all the women in this wing of the hospital had lost their babies during the second or third trimesters. A whole wing of us, I thought. Something to feel good about.

  Motherhood is carved out of death’s territory as much as it is out of the territory of the living. No one told me that. Not the pediatricians, and not the upbeat magazines like Fit Pregnancy and New Mom!. But when I turned to anthropology, to the books already on my shelf and the ones I bought in the months after I lost Daphne, trying to understand, I saw this massive true secret, stretched out but never worn out, across what seemed like eons. Nisa’s losses helped me make sense of my own. And now I learned something else, too, the obvious lesson that had never occurred to me before: when a baby or a child dies, the world stops. In a small but very real way, a way that cannot be undone or denied, the world ends. And then slowly, over the weeks and months and years, it is the job of everyone who loved that baby or child, who has ever loved any baby or child, to remake the world, to get it to start again. And then again, another job, more work: to somehow find a way to live in a world where something like this can happen. To live with the daily bitter taste and the unfairness, the flat, anguished sensation of having been turned inside out, of being unprotected. The crazed but logical, urgent-feeling need to hide away your littlest one, the one who is left, the obsessive fear that now he or she will be hit by a car or walk into the pool or somehow, anyhow, be extinguished. How long had it been, I wondered day after day, week after week, that women had felt this way, had known this and forgotten and remembered it? It was in us, I knew.

  When Lily’s three-year-old daughter died—unexpectedly, quickly, essentially from a cold—we made keening noises and fell to the floor, all of us who loved her, all of us who loved our own children, everyone who heard. The ripples went outward from Lily to us, her girlfriends, first. And from us to all our closest friends, to all their friends and then to every single woman and man with a preschooler in Manhattan. We were stunned, with pinched faces and tight voices and red eyes, as we brought our children to school and talked in the hallways and over coffee and on the phone. We cried and cried. We are still crying. Even those who only knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew her. No. How did this happen? It can’t be. What happened, exactly? Why? What will her mother do?

  Flora was three and three-quarters years old. Her hair was wispy and blond and her eyes were huge and blue. She was a fussy eater and she didn’t like anyone to touch her head. She loved cooking and school and ballet. She was just becoming herself. One night, about a week before she collapsed, she and her big sister came to our house to play with my sons, and while I was getting dressed to go out with Lily and my husband, there was a tiny knock on my door, and there was Flora, with a gift wrapped in white tissue paper and a gold bow. This is for you, she said shyly, smiling, looking at the floor and then daring for a moment to look directly into my eyes. I kneeled and kissed her. “Thank you, Flora,” I said. She had walked so far, all the way down the long hallway of our apartment, away from her mother and her big sister and the other kids and the warm, bright room with the television playing The Cat in the Hat, on her errand toward me. She helped me open the gift—a skirt that Lily had made—and then Flora headed back down the hall, all on her own. Later I told Lily this story and she made a choking noise and said, “She was getting so brave. She was doing more things like that.”

  She was here, and then she was gone. The mind understands it in pieces, the smallest bits. Not She is gone but She will not wear that tiny sweater with yellow flowers on it again, or those pink rain boots. Her small cubby at school, the one that held her pink backpack and whatever she made in art that week, is emptied out. I am holding her princess umbrella in my hand and she won’t, she can’t, do that again. How much time? How long to assemble all the pieces into a whole and take it in, the loss of her, the truth of her being gone?

  Gelada baboon, chimp, and mountain gorilla mothers have all been observed carrying, grooming, and cradling the bodies of their dead infants. Often, they do this for so long that their babies’ remains become mummified. In the case of the chimps and geladas, the mothers carry the corpses of their offspring in highly atypical ways—by the limbs, with one hand, or by mouth—suggesting that, even as they gently care for them, they realize their babies are no more. I felt connected to them whenever I thought of it, like an animal, dragging my deluded hope and heartbreak and instinct with me up and down the avenues, and I suspected Lily did, too. There was no comparing the loss of a toddler, a little person you had known and loved for almost four years, with losing a baby you never met. I was careful not to. But Lily would sometimes say, “I feel like you understand because something awful happened to you.” To all of us. But mostly, most awfully, to Lily. To Nisa. To so many others, singled out for singular, universal, unremarkable, remarkably unbearable sadness.

  It took a long time to realize, to really understand, that I was not pregnant anymore. One day I gathered up all the maternity clothes, and all the postbaby clothes—the nursing shirts and nursing bras and the soft sweaters with funny slits for breastfeeding—and put them in a grocery bag and placed them out on the service landing, the place for garbage and recycling and things to be repurposed as well, in the owner-to-doorman-to-doorman’s-family-or-church cycle that happens in buildings here. There, I thought.

  That’s when a kind of fog came down, and I could never remember where my keys were and I answered emails four times, and I raged. I raged at myself for misplacing my wallet and throwing my shoes in the garbage can after taking them off, as if that were simply what one did. I raged when I realized I had put my cell phone in the refrigerator. I raged at my doctor for not understanding that I had Alzheimer’s. What else could account for this inability to remember what I had said and done and where I had been and what I had promised? I felt cold all the time. My older son drew a picture that I came across in his room: two stick figures, one with a huge belly and a tiny body with Xs instead of eyes inside; the other with a box and lines coming out of it. What’s this? I asked, and my son said, “It’s when the baby died. That’s the doctor and his machine.” He wrote letters, one to Daphne and one to Flora. I’m glad you’re my baby sister, even though you died, he wrote to Daphne. I miss you, please be in touch if you can, the one to Flora ended.

  We were marooned together, our little family, it seemed, in our sadness. My husband didn’t understand the depth of my anguish and my anger—how could he?—and on the worst days I felt walled off even from him, as if he were someone who just came and went against the backdrop of what I had lost. I tried to work, thinking that writing might help, but my mind was unreliable and disobedient. I couldn’t remem
ber words—some that anyone might forget, like ephemeral, but also words like that and also. I would call Candace or my friend Jeff, the English professor, and ask them to tell me what I meant, what I was trying to say. They tried to help me through the disorientation and bitterness, one word at a time.

  Sometimes, the world outside our home seemed to be ebbing away. The things I had cared about or focused on—not just my work but also the work of finding a place for me and my sons in a world that had gone from utterly alien and alienating to familiar to almost-normal—seemed ridiculous to me now, bent and refracted through the lens of loss. What was the point? Who cared about one more book? Who cared whether my kid was invited to a birthday party, or spurned for a playdate? Why had I ever cared so much? I was vulnerable and raw, but I was clear that now I had no patience for the pettier games of Manhattan motherhood. If anyone gave me the stink eye, I thought, or said or did anything nasty to my kid, I would teach her a lesson, and take her down into the gloaming with me, and let her know a thing or two about what really mattered. I dared the Queen of the Queen Bees—who, it was said, had recently, in the school halls, grabbed and flipped down the collar on the coat of another mother who wouldn’t tell her where she bought it, and then mocked it as “cheap”—to come anywhere near me. Luckily for us both, probably, she didn’t.

  But something else happened. Every day, without fail, I heard from some of the mothers I knew from my son’s school, and my younger son’s playgroup. “The amnio just kept coming back the same but we kept waiting, hoping. So I was really far along when . . . you know,” a woman who had struck me as preposterously rich and indifferent and vain told me over coffee. Now she looked at me and said, “I know what it’s like, and I’m really sorry.” I had been so wrung out and tired, but she insisted that I meet her. We didn’t know each other well. Now I began to weep—about Daphne and about her baby, too—and she said, “I’ll help you.” She would. She did. She was part of this, and she knew it. They all did. Surprisingly, unexpectedly, the mothers, many of whom I had dismissed as unfriendly, self-involved, and shallow, showed me what they were made of, showed me what motherhood is.