Five Hours

by Lucinda Weatherby

  Again, I hardly sleep that night, knowing these are our last hours with his body. It is a vigil, like falling into a sea of stars, as wide open as a universe, full of the shards of my heart, full of love and awe and gratitude. I’ve fallen completely in love, and at the same time the boundaries of my world have been blown off. I am experiencing more emotional intensity than I’ve ever imagined. I can’t contain it: it is containing me, everything I am, have ever been, will ever be. A bursting, painful, ecstatic feeling all at once, and endless.

  January 18

  The morning of the cremation, Dicken and I decide to unwrap Theo so that we can wash and bless his whole body. Cecily, Maud, and Caroline join us as we bathe him in lavender water. I kiss every part of him, except his diaper-covered bottom and penis, because the diaper is stuck to him and won’t come off. I look closely at the marks on the back of his scalp, the slightly misshapen ears, his lovely broad chest, long skinny legs, tiny toes. I apologize to each part for my reluctance to love it at first. I see them all with utter beauty now. I think of Mother Theresa saying she worshipped God in his most wretched disguises. Your wretched body, Theo, is the most splendid temple I have ever beheld.

  Dicken kisses Theo tenderly. My tears fall on his little body.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” I tell Theo, my voice suddenly bitter. “You had such an amazing dad waiting for you.”

  We pick out an outfit from the diaper bag we took to the hospital—a white baby-grow, an orange wool sweater and matching hat with a velvet ribbon. Tiny white socks. I dress him carefully. I take out the necklace set the nurses gave us, two chains, each with a white ceramic heart. The two hearts fit together, the smaller one resting inside a larger one just like it. I pull the hearts apart, putting the small necklace on Theo, the larger one on myself.

  *

  This is surreal, I think as we head down the road into town. Dicken and I are driving to the funeral home to cremate our son. I hold Theo’s body close, inhale his smell, kiss his cool soft forehead and cheeks again and again, wanting to kiss him a thousand times so that I’ll never forget the feel of his skin on my lips. He is wrapped again in the white hospital blanket. We pull into a parking lot that I’ve seen countless times on our drives through Ashland but never really looked at before.

  I force my legs to take one step at a time, and then I find myself inside the funeral home, hearing Cecily and Michal’s CD of “Mere Gurudev” playing in the background, seeing family and friends dressed up and looking sweet and solemn. I break down and fall into Mom’s embrace, unsure whether I can stand. I let my mother hold me in a way I have not let her since I was a very small child. The muscles in my legs seem to be dissolving, and for a moment I wonder if I will collapse onto the floor. But the kids rally around me, reach up with their soft hands to wipe tears from my face, and I stand firmer.

  We sit and wait. Maud holds my hand. Kevin sits with Caroline. Jasper climbs into Dicken’s lap. I stare at Theo, touch his skin with my fingers, kiss his head over and over. I think of how long it took to build his body, all those long months of sickness and effort to get the right foods and supplements, enough water and sleep and exercise. Now his form—perfect, even with so many wounds—will go back to ashes, to almost nothing, within hours. It makes me think of those beautiful sand paintings Tibetan monks make and then destroy to remind them of the impermanence of life, of matter.

  Lots of tears, then relief: the process is being held up by a last-minute run for our doctor’s signature. I hope they can’t find the doctor. I would be happy to sit here forever. Then that moment when we hear the call—It’s time—and the funeral director telling me this—the babies, the children—is the part of his job he dreads the most.

  Picking out an urn, choosing the green one because it’s one of my favorite colors, because I have to choose something even though it doesn’t matter. Putting one foot in front of the other out into the parking lot and to the small cement room out back. A few friends and family following us. The air must be cold but I feel nothing. Jasper bravely carrying his brother’s body to the kiln-like, industrial crematorium. Looking at Theo one last time. His face is as smooth, as lovely as ever. Final kiss. Despair. Dicken moving more solidly. His hand opening the door of the stove. Me frozen. Part of me wants to tell him to stop, to slow down, to drag this out. Another part of me is grateful he can move at all, knowing if we slow down, we may not be able to do this, to say goodbye and put our son’s body in a furnace. Grace in distress, protesting, “No, they can’t put him in there! They can’t burn him!” Jasper reassuring her, “Grace, it’s okay. It’s just like a hot sauna, that’s all.” Dicken placing Theo’s white-wrapped body into the stove, which is just beginning to heat; closing the door, his voice breaking as he says, “Godspeed on your journey, son.” The funeral director turns up the furnace. I feel the rush of heat, hear the sound of the heavy door sealing shut. I turn away. It’s over.

  Dicken breaking down in sobs. Holding his chest. The relief I’d hoped for doesn’t come. I look around for something to anchor me, something to focus on so I don’t fall. Cecily takes me in her arms and I almost collapse. People are hugging me but I am stiffening. My feet feel like lead. I want desperately to get out of this moment, out of this awful cement building, but how can I move, and where can I go? I look to Dicken but his face is grim, his eyes too dark to connect with. Mom and Ralph begin to chant, “Om.” I’m uncomfortable, desperate to move away from all this.

  “I need to leave,” I tell Dicken.

  His face changes, comes into focus again, maybe because I’ve given him a purpose. He puts his arm around me and guides me out into the parking lot. Our friends Angie and Shannon follow. They are saying things to me but I can’t understand their words.

  I stand in the parking lot. Changed forever. The sky is gray, the world unfamiliar. He is gone, the body I’ve been clinging to for three days is burning up in a furnace of flames. The hard part has begun.

  *

  Back to Mom’s house. Empty and stunned, hardly able to move. Into bed, grasping Theo’s purple sweater and the white teddy bear the nurses gave us.

  That night, I get up to go to the bathroom and as I stand after peeing, the familiar energy coils up in my spine, about to unleash itself. I take a step and it blasts up my spine in huge shivers.

  “Theo, help me!” I cry out. I don’t think about it; it’s reflexive. The observer part of me smiles, touched that I now have a connection to the other world, someone to pray to.

  Dicken rushes in. He gets me into bed and brings extra blankets. I don’t feel as terrified this time, now that I know my strength. Or maybe because I sense the opposite—my nothingness, and how quickly I’m able to relocate Theo and reach out for him. I surrender to the process, hoping it will be over quickly.

  Maud, who is sleeping in the fold-out bed nearby, hears the commotion and asks Dicken what’s happening. I am fully aware of their conversation, though my whole being is absorbed in the intensity of the convulsions.

  “She’s having another episode,” Dicken says.

  “Why is she shaking so much?”

  “She goes into shock. It usually passes after a few minutes.”

  “I think she has a breast infection,” Maud says with concern. “When I had mine I got chills like that.”

  My milk came in today, so my breasts are full and achy.

  Dicken puts his hand on my forehead. “She doesn’t feel hot. I doubt she has a fever.”

  “I’m freezing, not hot,” I manage to say through my chattering teeth. The blankets don’t seem to be doing much.

  After a while, everything calms down. I can’t sleep and find myself sobbing, that strange, throbbing cry I’d never heard before Theo, but now know well. Dicken takes me into his arms.

  January 19

  In the morning, Maud comes to see how I am. “That was really intense,” she says.

  It takes me a moment to realize she means the episode in the night.

&
nbsp; “Your poor breasts,” Maud says, breaking into tears. “It seems so unfair.”

  I look down at my enormous, bursting chest. I feel a strong, primal desire to feed a baby, and my breasts respond, the milk rushing through the ducts. Some of it begins to leak onto my shirt, creating a round stain. I don’t mind it. It is something Theo and I have created together, a physical link. What makes me break down is thinking about the time ahead, when my breasts are empty. I resist wearing the cabbage leaves and tightly bound bandages my midwives have recommended to stop the flow, even though I know I am risking infection. I wish I knew a baby who needed breast milk. I rack my brain for any friend who wouldn’t be freaked out by the idea. Maud and I offer Sam my milk, but he shies away. I would happily wet-nurse or even pump for another baby. I come close to asking my midwives but sense that someone would have suggested the idea if it had been appropriate.

  *

  My father calls and cries on the phone. “I miss my mum at a time like this,” he tells me.

  “I know,” I say, thinking of my sweet grandmother and the daughter she had, Jill, who died of a heart defect at ten weeks old. “There’s so much I wish I could ask her now.”

  “Please tell me what I can do to help you,” Dad says, his voice cracking. “I feel so helpless and far away.”

  I think for a few moments, What do I really want? and then I know.

  “Dad, can you organize a memorial fund in Theo’s honor? People are asking what they can do, and we really don’t need any more flowers.”

  “Okay, I’d be happy to do that. What kind of fund are you thinking of?”

  “Well, when I was in the recovery room, getting the early news about Theo, I knew we’d get the best medical care available. At first we thought it was just a few cosmetic defects, the extra finger, the cleft palate. Dicken assured me the surgeons could fix all that, no problem. So, there we were in the middle of the night, with teams of neonatal specialists ready to go, a helicopter waiting to take him to Portland. I felt the luxury of not having to worry about how we’d afford whatever it would take to help Theo. I had such a sense of massive relief knowing all those surgical teams were at our service. I’ve never felt so helpless, and so grateful for medicine, for people willing to help my child.”

  “So, you want the donations to go to a hospital?”

  “No, I was thinking about this ad Dicken showed me the other day, about a charity that helps third world children who need cleft surgeries. I just feel so deeply sad for mothers who can’t help their children …” I start to cry.

  “Okay,” Dad says. “Consider it done.”

  *

  At some point that day, Maud comes to me and seems eager to tell me about something.

  “It’s Laura,” she says.

  Laura is a midwife and friend of Rhione’s who lives close to Ashland Hospital. Maud explains that after Theo died, Rhione wanted to stay nearby and not drive all the way out to her home an hour away. She has an open invitation to stay in Laura’s studio in back of her house, so she went there. Laura happened to be sleeping in the studio, and the sound of Rhione opening the door woke her from a dream. In the dream she found herself calling out to a man, a “high soul” who was curled up in the fetal position. The name she was calling was “Theo.”

  “Theo … Theo …” Over and over she called to him, telling him to come back to Oregon from New York, but he wouldn’t listen. When Rhione woke her up, Laura didn’t know I’d had the baby, didn’t know whether it was a boy or girl, didn’t know anything. And she could not have known that we were considering the name Theo.

  I am stunned and thrilled at this news of Laura’s dream. Warmth floods me like a sudden recognition. I call Gabriella, who is as moved and astonished as I am.

  “It just keeps getting clearer and clearer,” she says. “Wait’ll you hear what I found on the web. I’ll have to read it to you over the phone.”

  Because of the dream she had before Theo was born, the one about the baby’s totem being the black panther, Gabriella did some web research and printed out a two-page synopsis, which she will later bring to us. She reads me the list of qualities attributed to the black panther:

  Valor.

  Lunar, not solar power.

  Transformation through suffering and death.

  Solitary creatures drawn to other solitary beings.

  Awakens Kundalini energy.

  Associated with Jesus (suffering and transformation).

  I am in awe. Gabriella’s dream seems to have foretold many of the unusual, unexpected aspects of Theo’s gestation, birth, and death. Lunar, not solar power: he was born on the night of the full moon and never saw the sun. Solitary: I felt extremely solitary during my pregnancy. Awakens Kundalini energy: I had unmistakable Kundalini experiences during the pregnancy and since the birth. Suffering, death, transformation.

  Gabriella continues: “The black panther has the greatest mysticism associated with it. It is a symbol of the mother, the dark moon, and the power of the night. The black panther encourages us to understand the shadow powers available to us all, to acknowledge these powers and to eliminate our fears of the darkness.”

  Gabriella and I cry together.

  “Oh my God, he is the most amazing being,” she says. “We’re so lucky to know him.”

  Oh, the beauty of having a close friend get this the way I do. I feel full, my chest bursting with a sensation close to bliss. And I am so sad, all at once.

  *

  In the afternoon, Cecily tells us she’d like to sing a song she and Michal have written. She explains, “After we heard the news about Theo Sunday morning, we cried and cried, booked our flight here, and then sat in our house and wondered what to do. The thought suddenly came to me: Let’s write Theo a song. I turned on my computer, planning to pull up the words of the poem ‘The One Divine,’ which Cinda had sent to me, but when I got into the lyrics file, another poem of Cinda’s came on the screen. I’d forgotten about this one, and it blew me away. The music came through quickly, like I was channeling it from somewhere.”

  She begins to sing. I vaguely remember writing these words in my bedroom back in October, when I was about six months along. A poem about lost love, really, which I probably thought was sappy and thin but worth sending to my talented sister and brother-in-law, who can work wonders bringing words to life with music. The chorus goes through me like ice: Let go, now, let go, let go, I’m here now and that was that, he was real, he was yours but he isn’t coming back. I weep into Dicken’s shoulder.

  Let Go

  For all those months I’d swim

  In the mystery of him

  Catching glimpses and signs

  But not the whole design

  And then there was that moment

  That blew everything away

  A streak of light through history

  A glimpse into the mystery.

  (Chorus)

  I saw it in his eyes

  That look with no disguise

  But then I watched it rise

  And it vanished in the sky

  It’s beginning to fade

  Like the afternoon shade

  Casting shadows on your face

  And darkening this place.

  (Chorus)

  I try to hold on

  It’s why I sing this song

  Hold it to my breast

  Let go of all the rest

  But now I can see

  The way it’s meant to be

  And my whole life’s become

  A goodbye to the sun.

  Let go let go let go let go

  I’m here now and that was that

  He is real, he is yours, he is yours

  He is always with you, now and evermore.

  My spirit is moved, and triumphant. I can already sense the skeptical part of me that lurks under all the openness I feel right now. This skeptic will emerge, I know, questioning my entire experience of Theo, trying to recast the beauty and grace as hallucinations,
side effects of the surgery and medications, or at best invented and exaggerated rationalizations that serve to protect me from the random tragedy that has occurred. Right now, I let the words of the song I wrote months ago, before there was any inkling or outward sign that our baby had anything wrong with him, I let these words hammer into me, imprinting my soul over and over with indelible truth. You see? I knew. This poem, Kevin’s voices, Laura’s dream, the Kundalini experiences, the black panther imagery—what more proof do you need that Theo’s life and death were destined, part of a plan far greater than any of us can imagine?

  *

  That evening, Dicken tells me he’s eager to get home. I want to stay longer at Mom’s guest house. I’m reluctant to take another step away from Theo, another step toward life beyond him, life without him. But Dicken insists.

  “I want to get back to my routine,” he says.

  I can’t imagine what he means, or why he seems so agitated.

  “Can we just stay for the day?” I ask. “I’m not quite ready to go.”

  “Of course.”

  We pack up our things late that night.

  Dicken holds my hand the whole way home, managing the Subaru stick shift one-handed. We are silent, the boys fast asleep in the backseat, the sky dark. We pass a window I can see into—a man walking a baby around a room.

  When we get inside I notice that my breasts have soaked my shirt. I begin to cry, clutching my arms around my belly as if trying to staunch blood from an unseen wound.

  “Are you okay?” Dicken asks. “Are you hurting? Is it your incision?”

  “I just miss him,” I cry.

  Dicken takes me in his arms. My breasts ache as he presses me to him.

  “I miss him too,” he whispers. “I was pining for him the whole way home.”

  Dicken goes back out to the car to carry the sleeping boys inside, while I head to our bedroom. I see the stack of baby clothes waiting on the shelves, neatly folded. The changing table is all set up in the bathroom with flannel wipes and salves sitting next to it. My legs feel weak under me. I head for the bed and fall.