Holding Silvan

by Monica Wesolowska

  He does not react at all.

  When he’s gone, I tell my sister I made up that last part about the photos.

  She is shocked. “Why would you make that up?”

  I shrug. “I wanted him to feel my pain.”

  And it’s true, I can scarcely keep the pain to myself.

  Thinking we’re ready, we respond at last to the doula’s messages. We invite her to come over. We sit on the sofa and try to tell her the whole story starting from the night she left the hospital. She says, “I’m not a doctor, but…” and tries to blame the doctor for what happened next. When I don’t take the bait, she asks if there’s anything I regret. Thinking she wants my advice on how to be a better doula, I say I wish I hadn’t spent so much time in the shower because I felt Silvan’s last kick there.

  “Most women love showers,” she says, her face blank. So I give her a check and ask for the photo of Silvan she took at birth. “I had it, but I couldn’t bear to look at it,” she says, “so I put it in a drawer and now I can’t find it.”

  I wait. I want her to say she’ll look for it. I want her to treasure Silvan’s memory as we do. I resist seeing that, although I have something for her, she has nothing at all for me.

  HAVING GRIEVED BEFORE – having practiced on flies and old men, having lost a brother, a father, a friend – does not make me immune. It only makes me more patient, perhaps, with the feeling – the dry mouth, the foggy head, the sense of isolation. I watch myself, bemused, as I tell the man at the shoe store that my son has just died. Next, I try and fail to stop myself from telling the couple with the stroller. I watch their eyebrows shoot up, I hear their flat words of condolence; I see that this is my need, not theirs, but I can’t stop. Telling people seems to help.

  In late June, the gauze unwinds a little. With relief, I feel the pain of others again; I feel for my friend in New Mexico who tells me at last that her husband has left her; I commiserate with another who’s just learned that the treatment of her arthritis may have rendered her infertile.

  Tender and exposed, I decide to give up my writing. I decide to give up my teaching, too, and my part-time night job. I will do something more useful. Perhaps I will become a grief counselor and in that way make use of my pain. But the social worker who still visits us from hospice counsels against it. “It’s better not to make major life changes while in the midst of grief,” she says.

  Meanwhile, I continue writing in my diary. How patient David is with my need. I write frantically in the diary as if Silvan’s scent is in the ink, as if I am afraid to let that scent go dry. I fill notebook after notebook, and then, thinking the thicket of my handwriting may repel my return to these pages in the future, I force myself to type them out. Hundreds of typed pages, and still I don’t go back to my “real” work.

  A colleague calls, wondering if I will return. “I want you to know,” she says, “I agree with your choice. It’s natural. Think of birds, they abandon fledglings that don’t fly. They do it for the sake of the species.”

  I want to agree, but it’s not that simple.

  There is no one way for a parent to act. Nor is there one way to grieve.

  If I can shape Silvan’s life and death into a story, I can survive it. If I can hear that I was brave, that I was loving, then the story makes sense. I want confirmation that we have made the right choice. I want the story to fit into the story of my life. God may never have appeared to me in a shaft of light to tell me what to do, but still there is a voice inside me, a voice that believes Silvan’s time has come and gone while the rest of us have to go on living.

  WE GO ON living with a simple walk around the neighborhood each night after dinner in the safety of dusk. It is July, David has been off work for two months, and now he’s back and scrambling to catch up. Margie tells us that at her job she’s put Silvan’s face up as a screensaver. How moved I am to think that when Margie turns from her desk to pump milk for her own baby, Silvan’s face floats up angelic. David’s boss, on the other hand, has sent an email to the company asking people not to bother David with personal questions. Though David approved his boss’s request, it has been much harder than he imagined. He comes home squashed by the silence.

  If only he could talk about Silvan at work, he says, it would feel more natural to be there. If only people would listen. We walk around the neighborhood brimming with our story. At the same time, David is moving on. He wants to buy a car. Though I refuse to shop for a sofa, I concede that our car is on its last legs. I don’t oppose his research. It gives him something to focus on.

  One night as we stroll, David spots a car of the type he wants. It’s a family car, a station wagon, a safe and optimistic choice. He urges me to come and look up close. Peering in with my hands cupped to the passenger window, I see a car seat. I jump back as if singed. The car seat is blue. It is stamped with puppies’ feet. It is the exact model we bought for Silvan still boxed in our garage.

  “It’s not fair,” I say.

  “What do you mean it’s not fair?” David says, sounding like my father. “We have that exact same car seat.”

  We break into morbid laughter.

  David takes my hand and kisses it and as we step away from the car, we notice a couple of birds. They hop and trill at us in shrill staccato. We suspect a baby bird must be nearby but we aren’t prepared to find one. There it is, right in front of us on the sidewalk, squashed flat. We stop.

  “That’s the sound of bird grief,” David finally says.

  I nod. We don’t know if it’s true, but I wish I had the language to comfort them.

  I take David’s hand again. We walk along, linked.

  Mutation

  MY MOTHER POSTPONES RETIREMENT, MY SISTER RETURNS to Brazil, my brother reschedules his wedding from this summer to the following, and I am relieved as if this repetition all around me means that I can remain here circling like a bird in the sky; but at last, David convinces me. Three months ago, we were in the Bad News Room together and I was asking him not to let this ruin our marriage, and he was asking me to have another child again someday; so now we’re in that future time together trying to move beyond what feels like the tragic climax of my life. Perhaps there have been other times since Silvan was born, but this is the first sex I remember after him.

  It is mid-July. Though some people counsel against getting pregnant again until one has grieved “fully,” I know I will grieve Silvan whether I’m pregnant or not. And anyway, if I want to get pregnant again, my doctor recommends not waiting any longer because of my age and history. So I lie back and David cups the back of my head in his palm. This is how I used to hold Silvan. I close my eyes and, just as I used to confuse my own nose with Silvan’s while he was alive, now my whole body is Silvan’s body, and David is me, and we are all one, making love, as we were in the moment of Silvan’s conception, and I can’t do it.

  “Stop,” I say.

  David stops, but he is disappointed.

  “This feels,” I say, “like a betrayal of Silvan.”

  David shakes his head. “When will you be ready?” he asks.

  I don’t know.

  WHILE WAITING TO know if I can do this, I make the mistake of going to see Claudia and Brian. Their third child has been born and they’re having a belated baby shower. I must want to prove to myself that, though they failed to be strong enough for a memorial, I’m strong enough for the optimism of a shower. The women sit around comparing labors. I want to chime in. I want to say, “Mine was sixteen hours,” or “I only needed two stitches” but the end of my story seems to overshadow the joy of its beginning. Everyone avoids my eyes. Then a well-meaning friend leans over and says, “You’ll see. The joy when you have your next child will amaze you,” and I wonder what part of my joy in Silvan she has missed.

  I accept the little bundled baby being passed around the room. He has the same weight and warmth as Silvan, only this baby is as floppy as a ragdoll. In that moment, I realize how strangely stiff Silvan had been, his
brain already failing to show him how to move. I have to hand the baby swiftly on, which is fine because Claudia beckons me into the kitchen. She wants to tell me a story about her neighbor down the street, as if I’m best equipped to deal with this story. She leans in close to tell me how he was lying there in his lawn chair as he usually did but he’d already “passed.”

  She says this so softly I’m not sure I’ve heard right. “You mean he was dead?”

  “Shh,” Claudia says. She indicates her older children jumping off the sofa in the next room. “They don’t know that word yet.”

  I say, “But what about death itself? Surely they know about that?” but she only shrugs vaguely. It’s the vagueness that gets me. Though it feels almost as wrong as death to do so, in that moment I let our friendship go. If I’m lucky, I think, someday I’ll have children who will know about death. They will puzzle over birds who crash into our windows and lie broken-necked on the stairs. They will know that chicken comes from chickens and beef from cows. They will study the glassy eyes of fish at the market. Sometimes they will be the ones to kill things themselves and ask if they are really dead. They will keep a pet snail in a cage for too long and when they find it foamy and tucked tight in its shell, they will cry the way I cried over pets as a child and then be relieved when they take it outside to see it revive and creep away into a shelter of dead leaves. They will know that many people I have loved are dead and that the real dead stay dead.

  THE DOCTORS SAY it’s statistically improbable, but once you’ve been on the wrong end of statistics, statistics don’t matter so much. At least not to me. To David, statistics are comforting, which is why he’s ready; but even still he has to admit that statistics don’t address the heart of the question that remains. Could we let another child die? Even if it’s highly unlikely it would happen again, we have to ask ourselves what we would do. Even if we thought it was the right choice before, we’re not sure we’d have the strength to endure it again. I’ve been reading a book about neonatal ethics and stumbled across a palliative care nurse who’d like to establish the equivalent of a living will for babies so that parents who are pregnant start preparing themselves for the possibility of something going wrong. And yet I can see how hard it would be to introduce the topic of death to women like Claudia who seem to have the luxury of separating thoughts of birth from death when it’s hard even for us to think about a baby dying.

  At the same time as I hesitate, grimly asking myself these questions about birth and death, we’ve continued doing tests to figure out what happened to Silvan. The autopsy has found nothing wrong with his body. His asphyxiation during labor remains unexplained. It could happen again just as it could happen to anyone. Still, we continue exploring possible reasons that it occurred and that’s how my obstetrician comes up with the unexpected results of a genetic mutation that I carry on both sides of my genes. As a hematologist friend of a friend says (as transmitted to us in a suspect game of telephone), “It’s amazing she carried a baby to term at all and survived.”

  My doctor sends us to a hematologist for a consultation. He sits on the other side of a shiny desk with his plaque and family photos all around him. He gets out a study, something we’ve found ourselves online, that talks about my genetic mutation. He reiterates what we know: I have a higher chance not only of stillbirth or dying myself postpartum of a clot, but it’s also highly unlikely that a fertilized egg will implant itself in my womb. He’s distant and vague about our chances of having a child and I want him to care.

  “Would you like to see the baby we lost?” I ask, holding out a picture of Silvan.

  “No,” he says loudly, flinging up his arms. But it’s too late, there he is, Silvan, angelic in the sunlight, and the doctor sees him, sidelong; then he turns a portrait on his desk so we can see his daughter. He smiles.

  So I ask him. “What do you think our chances are?”

  The smiles goes away. He looks grim. “I can’t promise anything.”

  I am stunned. I’m not asking for a promise. I’m not asking for empty hope. Even I know, since I’ve already carried a healthy baby to term, that I have a chance. I want that chance, that basis for hope, broken down statistically. I get a second referral. This doctor is known nationally for his work in both hematology and obstetrics. I say to him, “I’ve never had a blood clot, nor have either of my parents. My mother carried three children to term. I carried Silvan to term. Where’s the proof that this condition is a problem for me?” I’m thinking of the family tree hanging outside my grandfather’s nursing home room in Bromley, Kent, a tree that goes back hundreds of years and wondering how many of those women lost babies. I’m also thinking of the bird couple David and I saw, trilling and hopping before the body of their dead fledgling as though grieving. I’m thinking of my friend who said she admired birds who abandon fledglings for the sake of their species. I feel strangely liberated from myself; I feel like an animal determined to reproduce.

  And to my surprise, the doctor smiles. He says, “So far, we have only been able to study women who are symptomatic.” In fact, what happened to Silvan probably has nothing to do with my “condition,” he says. What happened to Silvan remains a mystery, just something that happens in labor sometimes. He asks only that I consider, if I don’t want to be on blood thinners all through my next pregnancy, to give myself subcutaneous shots for six weeks after the baby is born since this is a peak time for clotting. In this way, he gives his blessing to go ahead and try. “Because you’re right, of course. We have no idea how many women like you there are out there.”

  On the way home, David tells me he is definitely ready to try again. He believes we will be able to have more children. But after my heady moment in the doctor’s office, the reality of pregnancy overwhelms me. I say, “I’m not sure I can handle being pregnant.” Suddenly, the weight and anxiety of nurturing a baby inside of me, of being the only one who can keep it alive, of facing the possibility of another death seems too much again. “But you won’t even know at first that you’re pregnant,” David says; and I say, “But I will.” And then, in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of five lanes of traffic, the strength returns. Babies die, I think. Mothers die. These things still happen and women like me still go ahead and try.

  Crows

  WE TRY IN AUGUST; AND WITHIN DAYS I FEEL MY NIPPLES tingle in the shower. I know I should be grateful, but within the first flush of pregnancy, there is bitterness. Silvan has only been gone since June. Back in April, I was still pregnant with him. With only four months between pregnancies, I feel like a mother whale who must gestate for eighteen months just to produce one child. I feel disloyal to both babies. My morning sickness extends for months beyond what’s considered normal. My back is already giving out as if I’ve never stopped carrying a baby. In the classroom teaching writing once more, I feel like a fraud; whenever I try to write a word beyond my diary, my mind goes blank. I find half my students know what happened, half don’t. Those who don’t must think I ’m strangely reticent about what’s obviously happening inside my body. I feel as if a nail is being driven into the top of my head.

  That fall, I endure various tests to determine if the baby is developing fine. That fall, crows also move into the neighborhood, fat ominous crows. If one flies over my head alone, I am all right. One seems a symbol of Silvan. But if two fly overhead, I worry that this means two babies will die, Silvan and another. If three, I think perhaps David and I will have one more, to make us a family of three. Or perhaps three babies will die. I take almost as much stock in superstition as in tests.

  At the drugstore, a week before the amniocentesis, a clerk asks the sex of the baby, and when I say I don’t yet know, she tells me to visualize whatever sex I want. “It worked for my sister,” she says, “three times.” Back home, I rant against the clerk and her arrogant assumption of power over the randomness of nature, and David teases me. “You should have told her you used to picture giving birth without actually having to raise the baby
and how that worked, too.” How I love the darkness of his humor.

  From the amnio, we learn the baby is a boy. That is a relief, that I’m carrying something familiar. At the gym, a woman rushes up and puts her hands on my belly. “Don’t I sometimes wish my children were still inside. They’re so much less work there.” I glare at her, scarcely able to contain myself from telling her how much work it is to carry a baby you fear may not survive.

  A neighbor overflows with empathy. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “of you back at the gym, going to your dance class. That must be hard, going back to a place where everyone watches each others’ bodies, where everyone must think you already have a baby at home.”

  How grateful I am to anyone who knows, to anyone who understands.

  Right after Silvan died, I sent a friend ahead to show a picture of me and Silvan to my dance teacher, so she would know. I hadn’t wanted her to rush over to congratulate me before class. Instead, she’d hugged me long and hard after class, our bodies touching in the space where I had danced Silvan as a fetus around the room, even in my final week, the two of us born aloft on my certain hope.

  As I get bigger this time, I still dance. I dance my grief, my fear through my body and I avoid the eager eyes of strangers. No public revelry over my fecund dancing for me this time, thank you. “Your first?” strangers inevitably ask. I stumble over the answer. “Not exactly,” or “Kind of,” I say, allowing them to fill in the mystery however they like. I am still grieving; I am not yet rejoicing. How hard it is to prepare for both everything and nothing to change. I refuse to say when I expect my baby to be born without adding humbly, “I hope.”