by Tracy Slater
I couldn’t believe we weren’t ever going to meet our baby. It felt both so obvious and so inconceivable. How I could mourn something I’d never even had, grieve the loss of something that had never actually existed? The tension between my fear of parenthood and my longing to have Toru’s baby began to transmute now into a new emotional torsion, a swirl of missing and nothingness, numbness and nostalgia.
But as my birthday came and went, I reminded myself of my enduring good fortune in other ways, and I knew it was crucial to remember such a fact. The previous January, Toru and I had celebrated our fifth year of marriage, and we’d laughed when we remembered my original “three-year nuptial plan,” long forgotten once I’d gotten over my initial nerves. The night of our anniversary, sitting at our favorite Italian wine bar, bubbles rising in clear flutes, we’d toasted each other, and then Toru had turned momentarily serious. “Thank you for marrying with me these five years,” he’d said, and once again I couldn’t believe my luck that somehow we had found each other across cultures, continents, and half the world’s wide curve. I hadn’t been able to have our baby, but I’d still been given one of life’s rarest gifts. I’d already gotten my number-one desire: to be family with Toru.
I thought back to him saying we were “together in always.” I had no idea where I was in my life, how I would start rebuilding after fixing my existence on a dream that never came true, how I would emerge from the limbo of the past four years. But I realized now that those years wouldn’t be wasted—and I wouldn’t even choose to do them differently after learning where they’d led—because they would remain a testament of our love for our baby, even if we never got to meet that baby. It was a testament that felt precious to me, despite the failures that accompanied it. Really, there was no better place to be, I knew, despite the sadness in my chest, than together where we’d been, and now where I was still, with Toru in always.
6.
THE ACCEPTANCE STAGE
The last stage . . . aims at the goal of a bicultural or multicultural identity [where] the individual has moved from alienation to a new identity. . . . The emotions of the previous four stages will be integrated and synthesized into this new identity with each stage contributing its own essential perspective to the development [and] an unfolding of the new self. . . . This fifth stage then is not the end point or culmination of development but a state of dynamic tension between self and culture that opens new perspectives.
• Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock
But that’s okay, that’s good. Because then I can send you.
• Toru
SIXTEEN
WHILE I’D BEEN WATCHING MY body’s stasis, its unbending refusal month after month to let a new life grow inside it, Toru and I watched another life begin to teeter. One morning during the spring before my forty-fifth birthday, Otosan bent over to pick something up from the floor of his apartment. Then he slipped to the ground. He lay quietly on the hard threadbare rug of his living room, his head curved at an angle against the legs of the couch, the cellular we’d pleaded with him to wear always around his neck now nowhere within reach, while the sun made its slow arc from the balcony floor to the living room wall and then began to fade.
As usual, I was “on call,” ready to be summoned by phone. Kei was coming home that night from Tokyo. When she arrived, he’d been floorbound for some nine hours. Sometime between the folding of his body and the eternity he spent supine staring at the ceiling, he’d either broken or bruised his hip. He refused to go to the doctor to find out which.
Within a few days, he sat in a wheelchair from which he’d never fully escape, at least not until he was forced supine once again, a year later, against the rough white sheets of a hospital ward.
After his fall, Toru and I tried to keep Otosan living in his apartment for as long as possible. We’d talk late into the night about what would happen if we threw out the bookshelves and laundry lines and small desk from the extra room in our apartment and squeezed in a twin-sized hospital bed for him. Would the wheelchair even fit?
“I wonder it,” Toru said.
But mostly, he shook his head at me. “You’d become constant nursemaid, with no privacy, and I don’t think you could stand it,” he said, more willing to face the facts than I. The diaper pads his father now needed but only rarely agreed to wear; the way I’d have to dress him and lift him and sit at the dining room table trying to work while he sat next to me all day in his wheelchair watching TV. I knew whenever I suggested ways we might move Otosan in with us, I was making Toru feel his guilt even deeper than he already did, forcing him to protect me, to recognize my limits more truthfully than my own guilt let me.
Mornings, a helper-san provided by the state would visit Otosan’s apartment, help him dress, move him from the hospital bed Toru had ordered to the wheelchair and then take him into the kitchen, where she’d heat the breakfast I had laid out the night before. Then she’d wheeled him back to the living room, where he would sit and watch TV and strain to hold on to his dignity in an empty room. He would stay alone until I came over in the afternoon to take him for a walk and fix his dinner, although three or four days a week I wouldn’t even come for his walk, and he would sit there silently until I arrived to prepare his food. He refused to have a helper-san in the apartment except for in the early morning, after Toru told him it was too much for me to get up at six-thirty every day and bike to his apartment. I blushed and looked down when he told Otosan this, and then I looked up and said, “Gomennasai, Otosan,” “I’m sorry.” After, I added, as if it could erase his anguish at having a stranger handle him each morning and then spending his days all alone as a prisoner in his own body, “But I can come every evening and some afternoons, too, and we can take a walk in Osaka Castle Park!”
When we did walk, I’d push his wheelchair and Toru’s father would look at the leaves, and we barely talked, but I found an unexpected soothing in the woosh of the chair’s tires and Otosan’s quiet breathing, his face turned to the sun. When we went to do errands or were on the way to the park, people would stare at us, and sometimes Otosan and I would laugh about it: the wide-eyed curiosity over the light-haired woman in yoga pants and sneakers pushing a wool-vested, blanket-covered, graying Japanese man.
On the phone, my family asked when I’d be coming home. My hope had been to go back for an extended stay once my forty-fifth birthday passed in October. But by autumn, Otosan was so sick and in need of such constant care that we couldn’t find a way for me to leave. Neither Toru nor Kei could take enough time off work to allow me to go home even for two weeks.
In between our daily regimens of work plus housework plus visiting Otosan plus trying to snatch a few moments to ourselves, Toru and I were trying to gauge my body’s cycles without the clinic’s help. Toru thought we still had a chance (though remote, he conceded) of conceiving a child without all the shots and doctors and medical interventions. But I’d read the studies and statistics, recalled all my dismal test results, and I knew he was wrong.
Once again, though, I’d come up with a plan, all neatly mapped. I’d give myself nine months to move on, claiming a kind of gestation period for my mourning. Speed-walking around Osaka Castle Park with my American friend Lisa (childless, single, safe), I detailed the perfect blueprint for my grief: a trimester of being a mess (Just like three months of morning sickness! Although now I can just be hungover!), a trimester of emerging from the thick swamp of sadness, and a trimester of preparing in earnest for a childless marriage, after which could bloom the resumption of a normal existence with new goals and hopes and a renewal of my part-time life in Boston. “And then we can start traveling together, too!” Lisa said, and, arms swinging under the shadow of the ginkgo trees, we guessed at new itineraries.
As I was talking from my living room one late-fall morning to my shrink in Cambridge with whom I had Skype sessions periodically, she asked in her even, therapeutic tone wha
t would happen if I didn’t insist on a strict plan, a black-and-white organization of my life. I could hear the ambulance sirens of a Central Square evening coming to me from the headset of my computer as I stared through the Osaka light, and I thought about her question.
I liked my crystal-edged intentions, so clean, so organized. My forty-fifth birthday had provided us a neat threshold from where I could begin to move on, and nine months later (What unexpected symmetry! What a clear path!) I’d stop my mourning and start the hard work of rebuilding all I’d relinquished when I narrowed my entire life down to medically enhanced baby-making in Japan.
But, of course, Toru and I hadn’t stopped having sex now that I’d stopped all treatments. We still had an intense tenderness and bond, more so now because of what together we’d hoped for and lost. Combining that with an agreement to have sex as much as possible in the middle of every month covered all our bases. I even found an unexpected comfort, a surprising familiarity in the loose schedule of our intimacy. After more than four years of having our couplings monitored, mandated, or limited by fertility clinics, we didn’t have to question how to restoke any original, more primal urge to be together.
This all felt too much to explain in therapy, though. I never liked talking about sex with someone I had to pay to listen. “Yeah,” I said into the tail end of a long silence, “I guess we could still keep ‘trying.’ I mean, just by having sex and stuff.” This could be a way to ease into the postbaby quest. Toru got to hold on to his optimism, while I could still feel close to him without holding on to any false hope, without pretending I didn’t know my fertility was now statistically considered gone.
When I switched topics to Toru’s father, my shrink didn’t press the issue. In the same therapeutic tone, she asked a question I could have anticipated even in a coma from any twenty-first-century therapy session between a Northeast female doctor and an overeducated female patient: What was I doing to take care of myself, to prioritize my needs, while I tried simultaneously to care for my father-in-law?
A few nights later, on Skype with my stepmother, I said Toru and I were beginning to look for nursing homes, called “care houses” in Japan, although we knew Otosan didn’t want to move to one. “I just never thought,” I told my stepmother, “that I’d be changing diapers now, only to have them be my father-in-law’s.” She told me again how sorry she was that we hadn’t been able to have a baby. “But you know, honey,” she said, the Skype connection crackling beneath her Texas twang, “in life, things just have a way of happening for a reason.”
My eyes narrowed to slits. I stared venom into the pixels of my computer screen. My stepmother was trying to be helpful. But I didn’t care. I ended the conversation quickly.
I knew there was no reason, no redemptive message, in our not being able to have a child. I had no patience for anyone’s well-intentioned efforts to push a silver lining my way. Yes, I believed Toru and I could make a good life without having made a baby. I knew eventually I’d write about what we’d done and felt and learned about finding joy in a barren marriage. And, of course, that was all a gift. But one gift didn’t exist to justify the losses that had preceded it. Why, I wondered, must we rush to make it seem so? What we’d gone through had been a testament of our love for our baby-who-never-was, but that didn’t mean it was the right outcome.
Instead of redemption or meaning, what you have to find in the trail of years of failures, I was coming to believe, is the determination to go beyond those failures. To build a full and meaningful life not because of but in spite of them. When friends or family talked about “gestating” a book or any other opportunity instead of a baby, I gritted my teeth. I counted their children in my bitter brain. Cast aspersions on their flimsy need to make a neat narrative out of grief. (Ignored, at least at first, the way their neat narratives mirrored my own determination to meticulously map each step of my own mourning.)
Our grief was small compared to many people’s. We’d lost embryos, not children; chances, not lives. But it did teach me one modest lesson about loss: usually, it leaves no meaning in its wake. Just the responsibility to build beyond it.
• • •
EVERY WEEKNIGHT that fall, after I fixed Otosan’s dinner, Toru and I would eat at a restaurant, and then either he or I would give his father a shower and put him to bed. I learned to kneel on the bathroom floor and keep my eyes lowered while I wrapped a towel around Otosan’s waist and slid the diaper pad up or down, or hold him under his arms and stare at the wall over his bony shoulder while together we crab-walked into his shower room, then lowered him onto a plastic stool. My eyes would turn to examine the shower knob as if it were a device of endless fascination, and then I’d turn it on and angle the spray toward Otosan’s stool, staring at the plastic seat legs hovering near the drain. After his shower, I knelt again on the hard floor of the changing room, raised a towel to his waist, and lowered my head, saying repeatedly “Sumimasen!” (“Please excuse me!”). For the first time, I felt grateful for Japanese protocol, which now gave me postures and polite apologies in deference to Otosan’s immutable dignity as the elder and my eternal humility as daughter-in-law, traditions helping to soften the brittle truths in the bathroom alongside us.
Afternoons when I came over, Otosan would spend long minutes straining to lift himself from his wheelchair or put on his own pair of socks. Then he’d fail and try again. I’d wait until he lifted his head and nodded at me, and then I’d intervene. Afterward, he always said, “Domo arigato gozaimasu, To-ray-shee,” thanking me as formally as possible. I longed to tell him how his quiet persistence in the glare of time’s iron destruction gave me strength and inspiration. That he was teaching me the rarest of life’s lessons: how to face the inevitable declines of age, how to lose our bodies without ever giving up the fight to remain in dignity. But I never did.
I thought about his huge loss happening just after my and Toru’s smaller one. How my body had revealed its first signs of irreversible aging as his began to swoon under its final wane. How his face never cracked with strain or anger as his body remained an elusive stranger to his mind, his foot like a foreign country to the sock clutched in his fist. He’d just try again, completely absorbed in the challenge.
I also never told Otosan how I began to find the strangest source of solace in his body, in the chance to comfort him even though he never wanted that. How after his shower I’d pat down his spindly torso and his legs that were like winter trees, and some small measure of my grief would soften over the loss of another body, a baby’s body, to fuss over. Then I’d feel guilty—a terrible, dark, dirty guilt—that I could conjure any kind of consolation from his suffering.
Some nights, the phone would ring at three or four in the morning, and Otosan would tell Toru that he had fallen, he wasn’t sure where—maybe he was outside now, at their friends’ summer cottage where they went when Toru was a child? Or at home but he’d need to leave soon for the office? He would guess at possibilities, slumped in the dark against his hospital bed, and Toru and I would drag ourselves onto our bicycles and pedal through the empty city streets. When we got to the apartment, Toru would distract his father with a change of pajamas or another shower while I scrubbed the rug, praying Otosan wouldn’t notice. On these nights, I didn’t feel consoled at all; I felt as overwhelmed and sad and guilty as I knew Toru felt all the time.
One morning, just after Toru left for work, the phone rang at seven-thirty. “To-ray-shee,” I heard Otosan say, “SOS!” Then the helper-san took the phone. She spoke fast in Japanese, and I had no idea what she was saying. I hung up and called Toru, who was on the train. He got off at the next stop to call his father, then called me back. The helper had found him on the floor and couldn’t lift him.
Soon after I got there, another helper-san arrived, along with Otosan’s care manager. Together, they bathed and dressed him while I wiped the kitchen floor where Otosan had fallen in the middle of the night aft
er, I imagined, tumbling into his wheelchair and pushing himself painstakingly forward, eager for an early breakfast, or just unsure where he was.
I called Toru again. “How am I supposed to behave with the helper-sans!” I asked, panicky. “I know it’s rude for me to do their jobs, because I’m not supposed to suggest that they aren’t doing them properly. But I can’t help feeling like it’s totally rude of me to just stand here and let them clean up! And I don’t want them to think I’m not willing to clean or help Otosan!” I couldn’t believe I was fretting about etiquette at a time like this, one half of my brain trying to gauge the cultural expectations, the other half stunned with worry about Toru’s father.
“Maybe just heat his breakfast?” Toru suggested. “But no need to help them wash him.” I flew around the kitchen, my face hot, my nerves buzzing, turning on the coffeepot, heating Otosan’s toast, arranging the butter this way and that on the table, as if angling the dish called for consummate precision.
A few days later, when I came to take Otosan for a walk, he was sitting in his wheelchair in the kitchen. “To-ray-shee,” he said, and he tapped his forehead. Then in English, “I think, maybe, something’s wrong with my head.”
By late fall, Toru had finally convinced his father to go to a nursing home, and after New Year’s, we moved him into a private one nearby, partly subsidized by Japan’s nationalized health system, partly by Otosan’s life savings. “How long can he, and then we, afford that?” I asked Toru, who calculated ten years. I felt thankful that Otosan would have a private room—not available at any public care house near us—and grateful that together we had enough savings for longer than he’d probably live. Then I felt guilt and sadness again to think we were budgeting a man of seventy-three to die by his early eighties.