Holding Silvan

by Monica Wesolowska

  TWICE A WEEK starting in the third trimester, I drive to the hospital to lie on a bed with a monitor strapped to me, listening to the heartbeat, because my doctor wants to make sure this new baby doesn’t die inside. Though I feel confident, I know he could die. The nurses are also confident, and they also know he could die. On the other side of the country, Eve is also pregnant with her second; she wants her midwife to tell the truth about labor this time, that sometimes even healthy babies die in labor and the midwife admits, “It’s true. It can happen to anyone; it has even happened to babies I have delivered.” I lie on the bed strapped to the monitor, counting his kicks, waiting for the nurses to say everything is fine.

  This time my obstetrician makes a commitment to me. No matter what, she will be the one to deliver this baby. To ensure this, her family bends their vacation schedules to the softening of my cervix, to the descent of my baby. She waits until she thinks my body is ready, and then she breaks my water because she wants the labor to begin in the hospital where she can monitor it. She is right about my body being ready. Within a minute, the pains start, as they did with Silvan, and my labor progresses naturally once more. I’ve made a note for my chart that I plan to labor without drugs, but that I’m also ready for any intervention to save this baby.

  The nurses who surround me are handpicked by my doctor and they are soothing and efficient. This time, I wear a wireless fetal monitor that is much in demand by other patients because it’s portable. With the portable monitor, I can wander the halls while the nurses continue hearing the baby’s heartbeat. My doctor wants me monitored for every second of the labor, but she doesn’t want me to feel burdened by my monitor. She doesn’t want me to keep asking to take it off the way I did with Silvan.

  My new doula is everything she should be, attentive, patient and calm. A help to the nurses but not a replacement for them. She has been a doula for thirty years and has seen babies die, has seen mothers go ahead and give birth again. This is why we have picked her. Because she can deal. She can even adjust the belt of the monitor in a way that hardly bothers me. We have made her promise not to suggest a shower. There is still no explanation for what happened to Silvan, but it’s enough that I am here in the same hospital without having to step into the same shower. So she never suggests a shower, she rubs my legs for hours, she marvels that I can labor without drugs while preserving my sense of humor. We laugh and everything seems manageable and fine until my doctor walks in and notices the heartbeat.

  It is half the speed it should be.

  How long has this been happening? Who has failed to notice?

  They all go into action, the nurses adjusting my body, preparing equipment, my doctor reaching inside me to screw a different monitor to the baby’s head…and then there is a new sound, higher, faster.

  “Is that him?” I ask.

  No one hears me. They are busying themselves with more instruments.

  “Is he damaged?” I ask again. “Is that him?”

  Finally, my doctor hears. She says, “Yes, that’s him. He sounds fine. He’s just too far down the birth canal for the other monitor to work. We were hearing your heart instead, but you need to push now.”

  “Okay,” I say as if this is simple; and I push.

  “Now wait,” she says. She unwinds the cord that happens to be around his neck. “Now push,” she says and I push and David catches the baby, cuts the cord, and lays him on my chest. I’m watching myself from a distance, as if this baby lying on my chest is miles away. “Terminal meconium,” I hear the doctor reporting to the nurse. Seeing my face, my doctor says, “By ‘terminal’ I mean ‘at the end,’ I mean the kind that’s okay because it only happened at the very end of his birth. I mean, he’s fine.”

  I lie there, baby on my chest, waiting to see if I can love him. THE BABY IS asleep in his bassinet in the living room. We have not named him yet. We can’t name him yet. We don’t know who he is or how long he will be here.

  I sit on the toilet and weep: I want Silvan back.

  That’s the first week after birth.

  THEN AGAIN, THERE is his first bath. We fill the tub in the sink, he squirms and turns pink, and when we get him out and dry him, he moves his eyes from side to side, alert and eager and exquisite, and then he sneezes. David catches the sneeze on video, and we watch the video over and over. “He’s so cute,” I say every time.

  WE TAKE A week to do it, but at last we name him Miles in public acknowledgement of Miles Davis and in private memory of my brother Mark.

  WHEN MILES IS one month old, my mother retires, my sister returns from Brazil for good, and my brother Kim gets married. I wear my orange silk wedding shawl and hide Miles under it to nurse during the special ceremony Kim’s wife has secretly prepared as part of the reception. Having changed from her white wedding dress, Gretel dresses as a Korean bride and comes to serve us tea in a ceremony that signifies the joining of our families. How random, how agonizingly beautiful is the making of families, Kim’s birth mother giving him up, Silvan dying, Kim becoming ours, Miles arriving, Gretel joining us to her family. Even David’s family is represented at the wedding. His mother has just returned to New Jersey after a visit, but his father and stepmother are there, his sister and her boyfriend. There are pictures of us all on the dance floor, expanding.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, once I’ve stopped giving myself subcutaneous shots against blood clotting and it seems both Miles and I are really here to stay, Eve flies out with her husband and two daughters to go camping with us. We have a briefcase-sized bed for Miles that we lay between our sleeping bags, but we are unprepared for a night in the Sierra. Each time I touch Miles, his nose and hands seem cooler. I already have him in three layers of clothes and under two blankets and then I add my down vest as a blanket. This is exactly what you are told not to do, I think, bury him in blankets. Though I am trying to become an ordinary parent who can go camping easily with her child, I decide I must just stay up to watch him breathe in the moonlight. To make sure he doesn’t stop. But then I drift off, and when I next wake, I reach out to touch him. His hand is frozen stiff.

  “Miles,” I shout into the night.

  He stirs.

  Three times that night, I wake and shake him.

  “Leave him alone,” David finally counsels.

  At dawn, I awaken again, disbelieving that Miles can still be asleep, that he will ever be awake again. I am heaved up onto my elbow, watching his face, when the sun rises over the hills. It pierces the canopy of live oak leaves overhead and filters softly down onto his face. His eyes spring open. He stares up at the leaves. I see their lacey patterns on his eyes. He beams. I sit up to nurse him and listen to the brook murmuring past. I feel both Miles’ warm weight in my arms and the absence of Silvan, amazed I can feel both extremes at once.

  “THERE’S NOTHING LIKE the joy of parents,” our hospice social worker says back in Berkeley, “at the birth of a subsequent child.” Having exceeded her limit of one year, she comes a final time just to bring a gift for Miles.

  How moved I am to know that Miles is as special as Silvan.

  In fact, as if the world knows of our grief and how special Miles is because of it, stranger after stranger comes up to us. Even in front of other women’s babies, they say crazy, exuberant things: “I’m not a baby person usually, but your child is perfect…” or “Your baby seems unusually wise …” or “always cheerful” or “Here’s the card for my talent agent.” It’s as if Miles is a reflection, a distillation of our joy. Or perhaps he’s got charisma in his own right. It certainly seems that way.

  One day, I’m out eating with a friend, both of us with toddlers. Miles is keeping me busy, grabbing cutlery, napkins, wanting to stand on my chair, sit on the floor, pick at old food. In between, I feed myself, listen to my friend. There’s no room for anything else.

  But suddenly, a grumpy-looking old man at the next table leans over.

  “What did you ever do,” he asks me, and I’m sure from his face that
he’s going to criticize our messy presence here, but he concludes, “to get such a wonderful child?”

  What I want to answer stops my tongue. “He was sent to me, as recompense,” I want to say as if I believe life works this way; instead, I say, “It wasn’t easy,” sounding like any mother, stunned by the weight and ecstasy of love.

  STUNNED BY THE weight and ecstasy of love, I want more, more, more.

  But if we try again, David warns me, this time he will not be so attentive, he will not give so many foot rubs; and he is true to his word. But at least the third pregnancy is easier. When people ask, “Is this your first?” it’s easier to tell the truth by saying, “I have an older one at home.” Usually the person asking says, “Your second!” anyway, but I don’t correct them even though inside I’m screaming, “My third!”

  It will be another boy, we learn. I’ve always wanted a girl, but now I’m relieved that I’m having only boys. If I keep having boys like Silvan, I seem to think I will miss him less. I’m unaware of this thinking until the birth – which is easy, I feel like a pioneer woman popping babies out – when the baby emerges not at all dark like Silvan or Miles or David. Ivan has pale skin and pink cheeks and blond curly hair like my own baby hair and Katya’s and my father’s before that. I stare down at him on my chest and say, “Is he cute?” Again there is that distance between me and him, the distance I did not feel from Silvan, though Silvan was already far away from me, across the room.

  “Look how alert he is,” the attending pediatrician says with pleasure, trying to make me feel good. “Babies born without drugs are so wonderful.” When I don’t react, she repeats herself. “Babies born without drugs are great. You did a good job.”

  I lie there holding this wonderful baby and wondering how many more children I have inside, how many more children I need to give birth to before I can get Silvan back.

  IVAN SUFFERS FROM being not just a second, but a third baby. He has two older siblings competing for my attention. Two first-born siblings. As if he senses he can’t compete, he cries all the time. He wakes easily in the night. Strangers do not flock to him, except to compliment his curly locks. Blessed with a third son, I wonder if I have wished for the wrong thing after all. It almost seems like a mistake, becoming an ordinary, irritated mother, swabbing at pee running down the wall in the dining room, carting a baby and a toddler, both screaming, one in each arm, for blocks.

  My mother says she warned me, but I don’t remember her warning. She makes up for this by taking my boys for hours. When she returns them to me, they smell both like themselves and like her; this heady broth nestles in the crooks of their necks, and I sniff and sniff at it. Pleasure now has to be measured by the thimbleful such as this, for without crisis, life threatens to become ordinary. I am frustrated once more with David’s inarticulate hesitance in talk about movies and books, and he remembers how selfish I can be with my time. With every sentence interrupted, and no meal eaten without the passing of a baby back and forth, or the dropping of a fork, or the spilling of a glass, no night unbroken, we feel almost nothing but misery. There seems not room enough for love. Passing a friend in our no-longer-new family station wagon, David rolls down his window. We have not seen this friend since the birth of their second baby. But there he is, pushing a double stroller. “How’s life?” David calls out.

  Our friend looks up, bleary-eyed. “Great!”

  I yell across David, “Well, we’re in hell!”

  Our friend grins in relief. “So are we.”

  I have arrived. I can use language sloppily, without apology or contrition. I, who once did not know if I could have any children, can say that having two children is “hell” without qualifying that I have actually had three, or that losing one child is more hellish than raising two. I have become a parent like any other, the miracle of my young children almost buried in all the work.

  Sunshine

  AS TIME PASSES, AS THE LONG DAYS OF SILVAN’S DYING shrink proportionally against the growing of my children – soon they are one and three, then two and four – I catch glimpses of Silvan in other women’s pregnant bellies, painful glimpses, fleeting glimpses. At baby showers, I find I still can’t grow giddy with the other mothers over the certainty that soon a baby will be here. The farther my children get from their own babyhoods, the harder it is to hold new babies and smell that distantly familiar smell. In every six-week-old, I lose Silvan all over again.

  Spring is the hardest. April 27th to June 4th. Every year, I spend those days in vague dread over an end we have already lived through. On one of those spring days – a lovely, balmy one – I am sitting on a park bench, chatting with the other parents when I notice Miles lying splayed on the sand, unblinking, staring straight up. Perhaps he is dead. A dead child is not something I have to imagine. My heart begins to beat wildly. Perhaps, I tell myself, trying to stay calm, he is merely playing dead to get my attention, to see how I will love him if he dies as his brother did. Suddenly, I am alone, no other parents near, though they sit beside me on the bench. “Miles,” I say with quiet urgency, “Stop it.”

  To my great relief, he’s alive. To my greater relief, he listens. He gets up and returns to activities that bother me less but probably bother the other parents more, throwing rocks, balancing large plastic toys on the tops of the monkey bars below which Ivan and the other younger children play. Like any parent, I worry about my children dying. Like most parents, I try to live as though they won’t.

  AS THE WORK eases slightly, as dinner becomes somewhat civilized again, we begin to look for rituals to bind us. We start by lighting candles every Friday night. This is not about a god so much as it is about pausing to be grateful. How grateful I am, how hard to pass gratitude on. Usually we’re tired on Friday nights and the children wiggle and giggle until we yell at them to stop, but surely they can find something to be grateful for. We make suggestions. David suggests they feel grateful for the meal I’ve cooked. I suggest they feel grateful for having food at all. This gives them pause, as it should. For they know about death. They have seen dead flies and snails, they know that their older brother is gone.

  Their questions start early, startling me.

  “What if Silvan were in this box?” Miles asks one Christmas – for we celebrate that ritual, too – over a present he’s opening at my mother’s.

  “Why would he be in a box?” I ask.

  “Wouldn’t you like that?” he asks.

  A few years later, Ivan pipes up from the backseat of the car. “What if Silvan comes back to life? Would you like that?”

  “People don’t come back to life,” I tell him.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Maybe,” I concede because it’s true; I don’t know what’s possible.

  In dance class, I’m stunned one evening by a vision of Silvan and me and centuries of dead, pressed up against each other in the dark, at the edge of an underground stream. I don’t know if I believe in souls that way anymore, but I am in awe of all that a mind can contain, more than we will ever know.

  If I could, I would hold Silvan again.

  But for now, I have only his ashes in a vase in the living room – after scattering a few on the trail where once I imagined his conception, I couldn’t let the rest go. And in a drawer, his pale-blue terrycloth pajamas. And I have his bench in the backyard. It’s a child-sized wooden bench, a plaque attached to the back of it with his dates and a quote from his song, the one we used to sing to him. “You’ll never know dear,” the bench says, “how much we love you…” Over time, the bench has become hidden. To find it now, you have to cross to a back corner of the yard, walk up three little stairs of stone, and duck beneath the drooping flowers of an angel trumpet. That was our idea, a hidden place to find if you make the effort. A place to sit and love him.

  Often it is children who find it first. They lead their unsuspecting parents there. When the adults reemerge from under the plants, I wait to see if they will say something.

  So
me do, some don’t.

  And then one day, I find I can forgive those who don’t. Not everyone has to know.

  Sometimes even I forget, if only for an hour.

  In April, Margie tells me, “I had my Silvan dream last night, I always dream about him this time of year. Is it okay I told you that?”

  Yes, of course, I say.

  A few days later, I run into Dr. A. He lives in our neighborhood. “Wasn’t it Silvan’s birthday yesterday?” he asks.

  Yes, I say, yes.

  Every birthday, David’s sister makes a donation to children’s hospice in his memory; and David’s stepmother calls to thank us for being brave enough to have more children. At my brother’s house, I see Silvan’s picture. At my obstetrician’s office, too. There he is golden amongst a swirl of babies. If there is a miracle to this story, it is that he is remembered. Not by everyone, but by enough. He is my boy, so specifically mine; but in death he can belong to anyone who wants him.

  I NO LONGER have to tell everyone about Silvan – but my willingness to offer his story remains. One winter morning almost seven years from his birth, I return to the diaries I kept while he was alive. From my diaries, I retrieve the feel of his skin, the sound of his little cries. I retrieve both the joy and the agony. I find the story of his life. Memory begets memory and within days I know I’m writing a book. Within months, I have a draft. And that fall, when the book is almost ready to be seen, I find myself out in the backyard with my boys on a hot afternoon drenched in yellow sunshine. I am pruning jasmine from Silvan’s bench while the boys dig a giant hole nearby. Where the hole will lead them, they don’t know, but they’ve been digging in earnest for over a year. How content I suddenly am, but also worried about my own contentedness. If I end Silvan’s story with children in the sunshine, will I have failed to tell the truth about losing him?