Dicken joins me in bed, turns out the light.
“Everything’s okay,” he says. “We’re home now.”
But even in this familiar place, I don’t know where I am. As I lie in the dark, my mind is silent, but I have the physical sensation of being tossed in a wild sea. The expected path, the future we assumed we were heading for, keeps crashing into the actual path we’ve found ourselves on. It is a violent reckoning, filled with shock and denial and resistance and struggle, waves colliding in a furious storm. Far, far below that clashing tsunami is the calm beneath the water, the peaceful, deeply sorrowful aching that is longing, longing for what will never be.
No, I am not home. My bedroom, along with the entire external world, has become an empty, foreign space, my internal world a strange and terrifying ocean of sorrow. The bed spins I experience when I close my eyes take me back to the nausea of the sickly first trimester, and the clear knowing I kept having, odd and random as it seemed at the time: The earth is not our home. So where is home? Where is Theo? Where am I? Who am I now that he has come and gone? I cling to Dicken’s warm body, feeling such a powerful yearning for him I can hardly breathe.
And suffusing all of this is the sense of peace that has held me throughout these last days, a silent weightless thrumming that soothes every part of me. Only one thing is clear to me right now: everything has changed.
PART 2
CHAPTER 16
January 20
The first night at home is long, with black, dreamless sleep punctuated by bouts of wrenching tears.
At one point I wake up with a desperate feeling. Where is he? I have an overwhelming desire to know the exact nature of death. Is there an afterlife? What is it like? I have pondered these questions at times in my life, but now they are an imperative. I need to know. Someone I was responsible for went over to the other side and I cannot rest until I know where he is, how he is.
We were symbiotic, as close as two human beings get, living on the same blood, the same oxygen, the same nutrients. And suddenly our oneness was cleaved, and he went as far away as it is possible to go. I don’t know if I can live in this world without knowing where he is, where he went, where that half of my soul is.
*
In the morning, I wake to find Dicken sitting by me, dressed and holding my hand.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod, pulling his hand closer to me.
“Let’s change this room around,” he says. “I think it would be good to shift the energy.”
I don’t care one way or the other, so I go along with him, sitting on our soft armchair while he moves the bed to the other side of the room. He works quickly, with a determined look on his face. Soon everything is rearranged, and dust long hidden behind furniture cleared away.
“Okay if I change the sheets too?”
“Sure,” I say. “Just stay close to me, that’s all I ask.”
“Do you want me to wash those clothes you have on while I’m at it?”
I look down at my wooly blue sweater, the one I’ve had on for days now, except during and just after the surgery. Gabriella gave me this sweater in my second trimester, which seems lifetimes ago. It is thick and warm and has layers and holes designed for discreet, easy-access nursing. I held Theo against this material for the days and nights we had him. I can still smell his cookies-and-cream scent when I bury my face in the softness.
“No,” I say firmly. “I’ll never wash this sweater.”
Dicken nods, looking reflective for a few moments, a faraway look, maybe sad. Then he whips the sheets and pillowcases off the bed and disappears downstairs.
*
I get up and trudge to the bathroom, splash water on my face, and look in the mirror. My cheeks look swollen, my eyes puffy. My chest aches slightly from my still full breasts.
I’m distraught that I have all this milk and no one to feed. I feel cheated. During all those miserable months of pregnancy, I was so looking forward to the sweetness of nursing: to the lovely hormones, that unmatchable satisfaction of nourishing a baby entirely from my own body, and that ravenous hunger and thirst, all those extra calories flying off. Here I am with my stored fat, wondering if I’ll carry it for the rest of my life. Part of me doesn’t care, seeing it as a sweet way to accept my imperfections the way I learned to love Theo’s, another legacy of his. I would like to be able to wear my clothes again, but it’s certainly not the end of the world. How could it be? Not even Theo’s death is the end of the world.
Still, when Dicken comes into the bathroom, I ask him, “Am I fat or just swollen from the surgery?”
“Well, if you are fat, you’re a beautiful fat woman.”
I smile at his answer. He takes me in his arms. I nuzzle his neck and notice how good he smells.
“How long before this ‘pelvic rest’ is over?” I ask, referring to our doctor’s euphemism for no sex until I’m further along in the healing process.
“Five weeks and two days.”
“Not likely!” I say.
He squeezes me closer to him.
*
I have a hard time eating. Whenever I try, I weep, thinking about how Theo never got to eat or even taste my milk. How he couldn’t have digested anything, how skinny his legs were.
My full breasts make everyone else sad but I like feeling them, because it’s a physical reminder of Theo. I dread them emptying into sagging sacks. I’m happy I’ll always have this scar to remind me of Theo.
*
My dad calls most days. Today he is crying and says, “I miss my mum.”
“I know,” I say. “I feel Granny close by. I wish she was still alive.”
Granny told me about Jill twice, very briefly, saying she thought about her only daughter every day of her life. I listened in silence both times, never knowing what to say, not even an “I’m sorry.” How I wish I could go back, sit with my grandmother, take her hand, ask about her lost child.
*
Cards and flowers are pouring in. E-mails too. The messages mean a lot, no matter how banal or clichéd.
*
Gabriella only took one or two photographs of Theo while he was alive; she didn’t want to use a lot of flash when his eyes were open. She has just emailed one to us. It is stunning—a treasure I will never stop feeling grateful for. It is the shot of Dicken holding him, their eyes locked in a loving gaze. Dicken’s big hand cradling Theo’s tiny head. Theo looking peaceful, relaxed, unbelievably present. Gabriella says it was Theo’s grace that got her the shot. She couldn’t see through the viewfinder because it was so dark in the room.
Gabriella tells me how improbable it was that she even had the chance to take a photo: She’d been on call to video and photograph the birth when she got the news from Maud, saying the baby had been born and wouldn’t live long. As she rushed out the door into the snowy night to drive to the hospital, she happened to notice her camera equipment waiting by the door.
“I thought, there’s no point in bringing it now, but then something said, Take it, so I did.”
I e-mail the photograph to all our friends and family, happy beyond measure that I can share Theo’s breathtaking beauty with everyone. I include a long note, explaining Theo’s condition, our decision to let him go, and our thoughts on foregoing prenatal testing:
I’m glad we didn’t test with this pregnancy, because if we had, we might never have met Theo. We are incredibly grateful for our time with him, and for the way the birth unfolded. He would have died during labor if I’d tried to birth vaginally because of the pressure on his skull. We may never understand the mystery of his brief adventure into our lives and we are missing him terribly, but we don’t regret the experience. It has changed us and opened our hearts.
Dicken’s cousin Aidan, who we are both very close to, writes from London:
I had been really struggling with getting any kind of grip on what you must be going through—partly the distance but also the scale of the situation seems too immense to
get any real sense of it. But this picture of Dicken and Theo is so gentle and peaceful. The way Dicken’s hand contains his whole little being is suddenly so simple. It’s a picture of pure love. So now I think that this must be an extra-extraordinary experience for you: wrenching pain but also a new source and target of love that will be with you for the rest of your lives.
Judith, a close friend of Maud’s who we’ve met, sends an e-mail from the workshop she’s teaching in Portugal:
I was very much involved with thinking about Theodore and all of you when the afternoon class started. We begin the afternoon class with a circle/checkin when we all say how we are. So I spoke about you, and how we met and how we have known each other over the years and of Theodore Simon and read your e-mail and showed the picture. Everyone was moved and affected by his story and that incredible photo of father and son. So he has touched more lives. It feels good.
The photo made me gasp and cry and marvel at the mysterious wonder of life. What a beautiful beautiful baby and being. Who was he and why did he touch your lives—my life!—for such a brief moment.
I am still crying but feel somehow filled with joy at the same time. That’s all I want to say for now. Thank you for letting me know, thank you for allowing his spirit, and the love and presence and awareness of your whole family, to fill me in this way.
My old friend Vanessa, the one who predicted in my first trimester that Theo would be a mystic, writes from Tuscany:
Theo’s eyes are so wide and full of wonder, as though fully drinking in and transmitting the love his life was made for with the intensity of one who must do so with completion in the brief stay allotted. May we all transmit and receive so fully, in our flickering existences. Indeed blessings abound in the reverberations of His gifts. Rest in love, and in nearness. The separation is only acute that we may be driven to union.
As we’re getting ready for bed, Jasper says, “I want my brother back.” Tears well in his eyes. He says to me, “Do you know how it feels to lose a brother?”
I am reminded that this isn’t only my loss, or my and Dicken’s loss. This will be a seminal event in Jasper’s childhood, something that shapes him. Kevin too, and Grace and Sam.
I ask Jasper about his experience that night. He recalls that Ralph was very sweet to him when he woke the boys. “I got to sit in the front seat on the way to the hospital, so I told Kevin he could sit in the front on the way home. Kevin said he didn’t want the front because he wanted to be in the backseat so he could sit next to the baby.”
Hearing this, I feel a slight ache in my chest. “What do you remember about the hospital, when you first got there?” I ask.
“I didn’t like seeing you in that condition,” he says, his voice cracking.
I open my arms, and Jasper falls into them. “I’m okay, sweetie,” I say into his ear. He is crying silently.
I feel deeply sad after the lights are out. Jasper, in bed between us, hugs me a lot, and I fall asleep to the sound of him singing made-up songs about the baby: “I have a little baby brother and we have the same middle name, and he lives up in the sky on a star, and he shines on all of us and he loves me, and he loves my mommy and my daddy too …”
*
In the night I have a slight fever. I am terrified I will die and be separated from Dicken, even though part of me wishes I could die and end the searing grief, and be with Theo. I ache for Theo. I feel bitter and angry and sorry for myself.
I wonder if I am being punished.
I hate myself because I wasn’t brave enough to have another baby sooner and I didn’t give Dicken all the babies he deserves. I feel angry at my body for letting us down. I curse that stupid chromosome, that one moment in time that changed our perfect healthy son into an unsustainable life. I feel hot with shame, sure everyone who hears the news will judge us for not having an amnio, for using midwives instead of doctors, for my being too old.
I begin to wonder if the baby would have survived, if we made the wrong decision, if we’ll get terrible news when the chromosome test comes back with proof that he would have been fine, that it was all a mistake, that with a few surgeries we could have made him healthy. I am terrified it was because of my fear of his disability that I denied him life.
January 21
Dicken says he wishes he could give me a perfect baby, that he has a primal urge to get me pregnant again.
Maud is keen to surrogate a child for us. I must say it’s kind of tempting even though it won’t bring Theo back.
*
I feel raw. My womb is empty, yet I still refer to my belly and say “this baby” without thinking. I still feel the imprint of his head pushing on the lower right side of my pelvis, where it was the last few weeks.
As I run my hands over my incision and feel the extra layer of fat on my belly, my lifelong habit of pushing perfection on my body rears its familiar head. But a new voice overpowers it instantly, saying, No, you will not treat the body that bore Theo this way! This body is sacred, a beautiful temple. As the critical voice is chased away by this fierce new protector, tenderness washes over me. I love my scar, hoping it will always be prominent, always there in its smiling shape to remind me of Theo. I hope the surgeon’s knife carved as deep as it could, made this etching dark and permanent. I love my tummy, the roll of fat, and will happily carry it forever. It’s Theo’s belly now, not mine. It is the mark of greatness, part of something much larger and more enduring than me and my vanity.
*
Caroline brings me a bowl of soup in bed.
“How is your incision, darling?”
I shrug. “Fine, I think. It burns now and again but I hardly notice it.”
“You are brave,” Caroline says.
“The physical part is nothing. It’s finite. It’s the emotions that are hard. They’re so huge, endless.”
“Yes, I know just what you mean.”
Caroline shares some of her experiences of losing close loved ones. Two of her brothers died young, and her husband, Dicken’s father, died of kidney failure in his early forties. Her three-year-old nephew died of pneumonia, and a niece, Athena, who I knew in the first years Dicken and I were together, died at age eleven in a car accident. I find Caroline’s matter-of-fact, open way of discussing tragedy comforting. She doesn’t seem to feel sorry for herself, and she’s happy to answer questions and think back on her experiences.
“My mother lost a baby just after birth,” she tells me. “His name was Patrick.”
I love that name. It’s my father’s and his father’s. Sam’s middle name is Patrick. “Did she talk about him much?”
“No, not really. In those days, people didn’t talk about anything like that. She was just told to get pregnant again and move on.”
“That sounds awful,” I say. “I’m so glad people aren’t telling me to move on and forget what happened.”
“Losing a baby you haven’t had a lot of history with is perhaps easier than losing a partner, when there is so much to remind you always.”
“It’s worse than I imagined in some ways,” I tell her. “But I’m amazed by how relaxed I feel about it too. I’m still here; I survived what I thought was unsurvivable. I feel wiped out but also like I’m a lot stronger and braver than I knew, like nothing can really hurt us.”
“Yes, that’s just what it was like when Simon was given the news that the doctors had run out of options, that he was facing the end. I’ll never forget walking into the hospital room after the doctors filled me in, knowing he’d just been told, and thinking he would be desperate, crushed. But he looked more peaceful than I’d ever seen him, and he laughed with happiness, saying he could finally relax. There was nothing more he could do, and he knew all was well.”
“Wasn’t that his last line in his diaries?”
I’ve read Simon’s diaries a number of times, eager to know the father-in-law I never got to meet because he died so young, when Dicken was twelve. His way with words was beautiful, his writing honest and
inspiring. It makes me feel oddly close to him.
“Yes, he quoted Julian of Norwich, All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
I recall seeing those words in Simon’s clear handwriting on the last page of his diary.
“I finally know what that means,” I say. “This baby taught me that,” I add, putting my hand on my lower belly.
*
Tonight, in bed, Dicken is holding his chest with both hands, like he’s in pain.
I reach out and put my hand on top of his, and he starts to sob.
“I just love him so much, it feels like I’ve been stabbed in the heart,” he says. “What a sweet baby, why did he have to go? We missed out on so much, it’s not fair. I just don’t understand.”
“It went by so fast,” I say, “but it was all there. We had the entire parenting experience—all the worry, the panic, the lessons, the joy, the love, the excitement, the stress, the growth—all of it condensed into a few hours. Amazing, really. Maybe that’s why I feel okay about it in moments, because I know it was complete, and as it was meant to be.”
“And now it’s over, and he’s gone.”
I move as close as I can to Dicken, kissing his cheeks and tasting the tears that spill down his face.
“We’ll never lose the sweetness, the perfect innocence we share with Theo,” I say. “He doesn’t have to suffer the pain of growing up. We’ll never be at odds, never be mad at each other. You and I will never have to worry that he’s lonely or cold or depressed, we’ll never have to see him drafted into war or suffering a heartbreak or an illness, we’ll never have to wait up for him late at night. Never have to bail him out of jail or send him to rehab, or let him go on a dangerous trip.”
“He’s safe where he is,” Dicken says. “I know that. I just want to be with him, I want to hold him and see him and take care of him.”
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