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Five Hours

Page 30

by Lucinda Weatherby


  “I know, but it’s the best thing there is, and I wish we had more than one birth child. We threw away what was probably our only other chance. I just can’t forgive myself for that. What was I thinking?” He’s clenching his fists, squeezing his eyes shut like he’s trying not to see what’s hurting him.

  “It’s easy to see it that way in hindsight,” I say. “If we knew what lay ahead, of course we would have reconsidered.”

  “The thing is, it’s my one big regret in life. If I could go back and redo it, I would. But I can’t.”

  “No, we can’t. We just have to grieve all that, and be grateful for what we do have.”

  “But maybe I’m not supposed to just accept it. Maybe the regret is telling me something about our present situation.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “It’s just that I could see myself in twenty years, looking back on us now and having the same regret. Asking myself why we didn’t try harder, have another baby when it was still possible.”

  I take that in and am silent for a while. “I hear what you’re saying,” I tell him after a minute or so. “But I don’t think fear of future regret is enough of a reason to try to have a baby.”

  “I know. But it’s not the only reason. I love being a father. I love having kids around. The way I feel about Jasper is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

  You’re selfish for not giving this great man more children.

  Then I think of Theo. He was supposed to be the answer, the joyful exclamation mark at the end of our family, the child who wrapped up our parenting experience in a pretty package and completed the “house full of children” Dicken talks about.

  “We tried,” I say.

  “I know.” I can tell Dicken is thinking of Theo too. “We got robbed.”

  I want to say that we still have Theo, that he’ll always be our son, but it feels like a cheap rationalization right now.

  The rain picks up. The sound of the drops hitting the roof becomes loud, mercifully drowning out thoughts.

  September 24

  I’m having a cup of tea with Cecily, and she’s telling me about her time with Jasper and Kevin the other day.

  “Those boys are so hilarious,” she says. “And handsome. My gosh, you are going to have girls knocking down the door any day now. Just make sure the boys know about birth control.”

  “Oh, we’re not worried about that. Dicken and I want grandchildren as soon as possible.”

  Cecily’s eyes widen for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing.

  I go on: “You know, we’ll tell them, Boys, don’t bother with condoms, they’re so uncomfortable …”

  I am joking, of course, but I send out a prayer to whoever is listening, to let me experience the closeness and mystery of babies in some form or other again in my life. Maybe a baby who needs a mother, or a caretaker, will come my way. Maybe a future grandchild or niece or nephew will have a deep connection to me. I think of Sam and Maggie and Lucia, already so woven into my heart. And I think of Adam, the son of Jasper’s hockey coach, not much older than Theo would have been, who plays with me at the rink while the older boys skate, how the other day he looked up at me and said, “I wish you were my mom.”

  December 2009

  I’m sitting in the freezing-cold stands at the rink, watching Jasper play in his weekly hockey game. It’s sunny and warm outside, but you can’t tell that in this windowless indoor arena. I know about this by now, so I’m wearing a large down parka, a wooly hat, and a scarf. I have a decaf latte in my hands, and when I’m not screaming and cheering or slapping Dicken a high five, I take warm sips of the sweet, creamy drink.

  Suddenly, I hear a voice in my head say, Remember. I step outside myself for a moment and see a happy, healthy, pink-cheeked woman lost in the excitement of a sporting event, enjoying the unmatched thrill of watching her child follow his passion with every cell of his eleven-year-old body.

  The voice takes me right back to the summer of 2005, four years before, when I was pregnant with Theo. How for all those sunny months, I was immobilized by horrific morning sickness, essentially poisoned by the faulty genes that made up each cell of the growing baby and placenta. For weeks, I lay on the couch, barely able to eat or move. I remember how reading made me sicker, but watching TV was doable, so I attempted to forget the deathly nausea by watching Wimbledon. Match after match, I tried to focus, but not even my favorite sporting event of the year could distract me. The hours felt like days, a vicious hangover that would not relent. I prayed for relief, thinking, If I knew I’d always feel this bad, I’d rather be dead. This is what strikes me now, how I watched the tennis and envied the spectators as they smiled, cheered, and took sips from paper cups, so remote from my reality it was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope at impossibly small versions of my own species. I fantasized that one day in the distant future, I might feel well enough to venture out into the world again, sip a cup of coffee or tea, and enjoy myself. It seemed like a far-off paradise.

  And now, here I am at the rink, feeling fine, my mouth savoring the bittersweet coffee, my spirit soaring on the ice with my strong, healthy son. I thank that voice for reminding me of where I’ve been, of what came and went. I know if I hadn’t gone through that pregnancy and felt that deep yearning to know health and life again, I might take this seemingly ordinary moment for granted, this routine Saturday-morning hockey game with a warm drink in my hands and a beautiful boy sweating his heart out on the ice. Millions of American parents are watching their children in sporting events as we sit here. Millions of healthy, fortunate people with healthy, active kids.

  Jasper lives for hockey. His nighttime prayer is, “God, let me be in the NHL.” My prayer is simply, “God, let him be.” Let him breathe and skate and chase his dreams, but most of all, let him be. Let him outlive me. This miracle child, the only one of my handful of pregnancies to make it to birth and survive into childhood.

  I still look back on myself in that sickbed of pregnancy. As I lay there patiently, unknowingly poisoned by a faulty placenta, willing to do whatever it took to carry that new life in me for nine months, I would hear through the open window the loud cries of my then-seven-year-old playing soccer on the lawn with his cousins, his robust lungs taking in the fresh summer air. Brave woman, lying in misery, puzzled by dreams of death each night, by strange-seeming images on TV each day, willing herself to focus on life and the living: I will never forget you, or the child you carried and lost, the one whose damaged lungs only lasted for four hours and forty-four minutes and then gave out as you held him in your arms. And I will never take this living son for granted. Nor will I take our other beautiful boy, Kevin, for granted. How incredibly fortunate we are to get to raise these two children.

  Of course I will forget how fortunate I am. I will lose my temper with Jasper in the car on the way home from the rink because he left his stick in the locker room again. My body will brace in despair as he shouts back at me, and I will think something defeatist: I hate being a mother, I’m no good at it! But I know something now that I didn’t before Theo came along. I know all of us will die, just as we were born. I don’t mean I just know it, I really know it. I can feel it in my deepest being. And I’m okay with not being able to fully understand why we are here, why we get the hours or days or years we do, and where we are going after we die. In the face of this, all I can do is accept my humanness and love as much as I can in every situation, including myself and others when we forget to be loving, when we break our promises, when we fail each other, when we do things we swore we would never do, when we expect too much of ourselves, each other, when we forget we’re only human, when we forget how lucky we are to be alive.

  *

  Official mourning periods vary widely, from thirteen days in the Hindu tradition to a year in Judaism to two years in Venezuela. In Edwardian and Victorian England, family members were expected to wear black for months or years, depending on the loss. The guideline for the
death of a child was “as long as one feels disposed.”

  *

  By the time three years have passed since Theo’s birth and death, I will notice a significant shift. I will still think about him frequently, but it is as if a veil has been lifted, and I no longer filter everything through the lens of that experience. For those first three years, I saw, heard, felt, dreamed, and processed everything from the vantage point of, How do I relate to this given what I’ve been through, given that my beloved child has come and gone? I won’t really notice the veil lifting, but at some point I realize it’s not there anymore. I will start to think of the whole experience as something that happened to me, not something that defines me. While I can easily talk about it when asked, I will no longer feel compelled to; I’ve told the story so many times it’s almost as if it belongs to somebody else now, a younger version of me. Finally, after all these months, I will feel that I’m back in the land of the living, my feet firmly planted on the ground again.

  When I turn forty, almost four years after Theo, I will wake up on my birthday and cry my eyes out, not for any specific reason, more for the passage of time, and a vague sense that something in my life is ending. I will say a prayer, asking the universe to bring me more life. I’m no longer afraid of deep emotion, of intensity. I don’t want to continue navigating my life by trying to avoid mistakes and hurts. I tell whoever is listening to bring it on, to fill the rest of my days not with safety and comfort but with adventure and edge, the experiences that make me feel most alive, and have the power to change me.

  *

  Einstein wrote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

  I think about the first time I saw a baby being born, several years before I became a mother myself, and how I was seized by the undeniable evidence in front of me that being able to reproduce and end up with a real, live human baby is an absolutely astonishing miracle.

  But I can see that it’s not just the healthy baby outcome that is miraculous. The body’s ability to know that something is wrong early on in embryonic development (the blighted ovum) is arguably as wondrous as the birth of a perfectly formed baby. Most women experiencing such an event, usually in the form of a first-trimester miscarriage, would probably think of it as a tragedy, or at least a disappointment. But it is a miracle, one that keeps the majority of parents from having to cope with a stillbirth or raising a severely handicapped child.

  So what do you call it when an embryo that should have been detected as improperly formed beats the odds by fooling the body? What do you call it when that embryo becomes a fetus that defies the high probability of miscarriage and stillbirth and is born full-term? The chances of a thirty-five-year-old woman conceiving, gestating, and giving birth to a live baby with trisomy 13 are much, much lower than the odds of her delivering a healthy baby. Human biology’s fantastically intricate checks and balances have fallen short. Are these facts just tragic anomalies, or do they point to something greater?

  And what about the circumstances that lined up just so, giving Theo the chance to be born alive? He was conceived by parents who chose to forgo prenatal testing, who were never urged to consider abortion. If we’d known about his condition and had not opted for an abortion, a stillbirth would probably have resulted because a C-section would have been considered too dangerous for me, and Theo’s chances of surviving a vaginal delivery were almost nil. If I’d insisted on a home birth even after the ultrasounds, or changed my mind at zthe last minute and gotten to the hospital too late, or refused the C-section, we would not have met Theo alive.

  Had Theo been conceived by another couple, anywhere in the world, he probably wouldn’t have lived outside the womb. The vast majority of American women use an OB/GYN for prenatal care, and most European women see nurse-midwives. In both cases, testing is standard. So a Western woman would likely have known the baby’s condition, and would have either opted for an abortion or had a stillbirth by vaginal delivery. If carried by a poor woman in a third world country where the rates of miscarriage and maternal deaths in childbirth are much higher, it’s even less likely Theo would have made it through the pregnancy and birth, and that mother’s life could also have been in danger.

  Theo’s brief life on earth should not have happened. But it happened to us. We were the tiny pinprick in the fabric of the universe through which Theo entered this world. He passed obstacle after obstacle, and came to a family and a community where his gifts of joy and wonder would not be wasted.

  Is this simply an extraordinary set of coincidences, and nothing more? Or could it be that as a soul waiting to be born, Theo sought us out? Did he line up with the whole universe in some sort of perfect order our minds can’t fully fathom? Did he know his mother was born under Black Moon Lilith, and would be open to the powerful confluence of mothering and death? Did he know his dad had the chart of a benevolent king with boundless love for children, a father who would love him fully and endlessly whether he lived for one minute or a hundred years? Did he trust we would make that series of crucial choices during the pregnancy and just before the birth, the very choices which gave him life?

  When I think that Theo might have chosen us, it’s not because Dicken and I, our friends and our family, are such exceptional people—how well I know our flaws, especially my own! We are ordinary people who are open to the mystery of birth and death. We did not look away from Theo. We took in his beauty forever. Maybe that’s all he wanted.

  The amazing systems of our human biology and of modern medical marvels like amniocentesis did not prevent Theo’s birth. So is this occurrence a miracle, or does it justify Einstein’s first option, that nothing is a miracle, that everything is flawed?

  All I know is that the odds of it happening to us were minuscule, and that some days I’m convinced that we had terrible, terrible luck. Yet there are moments when I think of Theo, the astonishing being he was and all the light he brought people and continues to bring in odd yet undeniable ways, how Paul said he saw Theo’s life as the “only perfect life” he’s ever seen, and I harbor a secret, bubbling notion that we hit the jackpot. In those moments I call it an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime miracle.

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has helped me with this book, especially:

  Marcia Trahan, dream editor, whose enthusiasm and patience never waned. I could not have done this without her.

  Johnny Temple, my hero.

  Dad, my lifelong writing champion—yes, from before I could even hold a pencil.

  Dicken.

  Maud, who insisted I expand the birth story and share it.

  Uncle Henry.

  Mom.

  Mark.

  Ben & Cecily.

  Gabriella.

  Readers along the way: Mary Makenna, Petranka Palzewicz, Khaliqa, Grace Powell, Caroline Weatherby, Katie Sloan, Mary Moeglein, Kara Gilmour, Kathy Temple, Wendy Kline, Natalie Tyler, Vanessa Albrecht, Sarah Rutledge, Pam Colloff.

  Guidance: Melissa Coleman, Glenda Burgess, Elizabeth Heineman, Sophie Burnham, Tom McCarthy, Roanna Rosewood.

  Jasper, who told me years ago, as I scribbled away, “Mom, when I make it to the NHL, I’m gonna get that book published for you.”

  LUCINDA WEATHERBY has a BA in English and an MA in psychology. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Sun and Connotation Press. She works as a grief counselor in Ashland, Oregon.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2015 by Lucinda Weatherby

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-433-3

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-437-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943282

  First printin
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