by Jackie Hance
“Well, let’s see, my first name is Rachel, and you like the gold, so how about if we put those together? Rachel Gold.” She smiled and stroked my head again. “You can be Rachel Gold. Does that work for you?”
“Sure.” Rachel Gold. I felt an odd mix of confusion and amazement at how easy it was to assume a new identity.
Doctors coming in and out the rest of the day all looked at their clipboards and said cheerfully, “Hi, Rachel, how do you feel?” Sometimes I forgot to respond and Nurse Rachel would gently nudge me.
The diagnosis turned out to be a gallstone attack, and after two nights in the hospital, I went home. But I knew that when I came back to the hospital to have my baby, I would once again be Rachel Gold. It seemed right: Jackie Hance had been the mother of three wonderful girls. When they died, part of her died, too. She had become a different person.
Jackie and Rachel. My life had changed so dramatically that it shouldn’t have surprised me to have a different name. I had to get used to being myself and someone else at the same time.
• • •
We were getting close to the finish line of this pregnancy, but Warren wasn’t sure that we’d ever cross it.
Going out with friends usually worked as a good pick-me-up for Warren and me. But one weekend in September, we hit an all-time low when even that didn’t work. We had joined a few couples at a nearby restaurant, and as the conversation swirled, Warren seemed far away. He didn’t pay any attention as Brad chatted about possibly buying a vacation home and Mark reported how happy he and Isabelle were in their new home.
“I always want to have a dream,” Mark said. “That’s what keeps me going.”
The comment made me stop. How nice it would be to have dreams for the future again. I looked over at Warren, who pushed his food around on his plate but didn’t bother to eat. Or even to look up.
“What are your dreams, Warren?” I asked, trying to get him into the spirit.
“I dream about getting through the day,” Warren said. “That’s about all.”
“That’s so depressing,” I said.
Warren put down his fork and dropped his head into his hands. “I’m exhausted,” he said. “I think I need to go home.”
Brad sighed. “You two are just so sad tonight.”
Warren got up from the table and as I followed, Brad reached for my hand. “Let him just go to sleep tonight, Jackie,” he whispered. “He’s completely worn down.”
Warren and I drove home in silence, and following Brad’s advice, I let him go upstairs without another word. I was beginning to understand that my high energy and roller-coaster emotions could wear people down. I could generally keep fighting and talking and talking and fighting all night, but right now, that would be counterproductive. Warren needed to get his reserves back.
“Last night at dinner was the first time I felt that I didn’t even fit in with my friends anymore,” I said to Warren the next morning.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Maybe because they were talking about dreams for the future,” I said. “We need to have dreams again, too, Warren. To dream is to hope. We’ve got to keep dreaming in order to live.”
I hoped he’d feel the uplift of the moment, but instead he shook his head. “I’m so broken inside,” he said shakily. “All my reserves are gone. I can’t dream. I can barely get through a day of work.”
Warren’s own grieving process hadn’t been as loud as mine, but it had been just as tortured. It hurt to see him sinking lower and lower under the burdens of sadness and lawsuits and anxiety about the future. And I didn’t make it any easier for him. “How do I get my husband back?” I asked. “The one who took care of everything.”
A profound sadness washed over Warren’s face. “I don’t know how to give you what you need,” he said. “I realize you don’t like me to call your friends when you’re upset. You want me to take care of you. But I don’t feel like I can. I can’t even make my wife happy anymore.”
I looked at him, stunned. His moment of vulnerability now stopped me cold. I never thought Warren heard me before when I said I wanted him, not my friends, to comfort me in my darkest moments. The other night when I was crying and he called Laura, I assumed he just didn’t want to deal with my hysterics. But standing with him now, I suddenly had a new perspective. He wanted to be my white knight, my emotional savior. How mortifying for him to feel that he didn’t have the strength to be the hero on the horse, riding in to save the day. The world had different expectations for how Warren and I would handle our tragedy.
I, the shattered mother, was allowed to fall apart, scream in pain, rage at the unfairness of fate. Warren, the heartbroken father, was expected to go to work and prop me up.
I stepped a little closer to him now.
“Remember what I said that night? I need a hug from my husband.”
He looked at me distrustfully. The flip side of not getting what I wanted from Warren was that I hadn’t offered the love, comfort, and support he needed, either. I had resisted any physical affection for a long time. Our discussing it the other day hadn’t gotten us anywhere.
“Can we at least try it?” I asked.
Awkwardly, standing in the kitchen, we put our arms around each other. My belly got in the way and we smiled and readjusted. The hug didn’t last long, but it was a start.
Two broken people, looking for the glue that would help us mend, and daring to hope we could each find it in the other. Maybe that was the best kind of dream of all.
Twenty-six
My anxiety had only been getting worse as the pregnancy progressed, and I couldn’t sleep and wasn’t eating much. I had still gained only fifteen pounds. The baby seemed healthy, but the doctor didn’t want to take any chances. Though my due date was still some weeks off, she scheduled a Cesarean section for October 6.
“That’s Warren’s birthday!” I told her delightedly. “You picked a perfect day!”
I’m always looking for omens, and this seemed like a good one. I wasn’t sure what the coincidence of the date signified, but somehow it felt lucky.
My doctor, Randi Rothstein, explained that she would do an amniocentesis before the delivery to make sure the baby’s lungs were sufficiently mature. Only once the baby passed that test would I come in for the C-section.
I marked October 6 on my calendar with a big red star. At least I was off the hook for buying Warren a birthday present. The baby would be his gift, all wrapped up in one of the soft pink blankets and pretty satin hair bows I had received at the shower.
But at the next doctor’s visit, Dr. Rothstein had changed the plan. “Hospital policy doesn’t allow an amnio to check the lungs until thirty-eight weeks,” she explained. “So we’ll push your date back to October eleventh.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, feeling like a little kid who’s just had a lollipop taken away.
“It’s only a week,” she said consolingly.
I started to explain about the lucky day, but then stopped. She didn’t seem like the superstitious type.
I called all my friends to tell them about the date change, and I kept moaning that this must mean the good omen had turned bad. Most told me not to be silly, or echoed Dr. Rothstein’s comment that it was only seven days. But Warren, used to my looking for portents and prophecies, had a better way to save the situation. He had just come home from work and was opening and closing kitchen cabinets, looking for something to eat. But he saw my crestfallen face and immediately sat down at the kitchen table with me.
“October eleventh,” he said thoughtfully. He doodled on a piece of paper for a minute, and then grinned. “Thank goodness she changed it, because October eleventh is the perfect date. Numerology. It couldn’t be better.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“It’s 10/11/11. Look.” He slid the paper over to me and I saw: 101111.
“So what?” I asked.
“So, ones for girls and zeroes for boys. I’m the ‘
zero’ in the lineup. You’re the ‘one’ to one side of me. And my four daughters are on the other side.”
I looked at the numbers again, which seemed to swim in front of my eyes. “Show me again.”
“That’s Jackie,” he said, pointing to the first 1. He slid his finger over to the 0. “That’s Warren.” Then the next lineup of 1s: “Emma, Alyson, Katie, Kasey. So it’s Warren surrounded by his five ladies.”
101111.
I got it.
“That’s kind of amazing,” I said, suddenly smiling.
“And I don’t even mind being the big fat zero,” he joked.
Maybe you can make anything seem like a good sign if you try hard enough. A lineup of numbers can signify a date on the calendar, or it can be the stand-in for a loving and growing family. It’s just a question of being positive in how you interpret numbers—and life.
• • •
On October 10, my doctor took my amnio to find out if I could deliver the next day. The results would come back in two parts—a “rapid test” took six hours, and the fuller test took twelve.
The rapid report wasn’t encouraging. “It looks like you’re going to have to wait another week,” the doctor said when she called me.
“Oh no,” I said, sighing heavily into the phone.
“I’ll call you about nine p.m. when we get the other test back and let you know definitely,” she said.
Since it was Monday night, Denine came over to watch TV as she always did, and Karen joined us, too. My mom had come from New Jersey because she thought we’d have the baby the next day, and she hadn’t been convinced to stay home by the earlier call. We all sat in the living room, watching TV and eating ice cream. Warren popped in and out several times, asking if the doctor had called yet.
“It’s not going to happen,” I told him. “I won’t be at the hospital. Plan on a regular workday tomorrow.”
When the first TV show was over, Karen said, “It’s nine o’clock. Call her, Jackie. Maybe she forgot to call you.”
I picked up the phone to call, then put it right back down. Forgot? How likely was that? I still had my hand on the receiver when it rang.
“Hello?”
“Pack your bags,” the doctor said. “You’re going to the hospital tomorrow to have your baby.”
“You’re kidding. Oh my God.” I dropped the bowl of ice cream and watched it spill all over the floor. I shook all over.
“I thought it would be next week.”
“The twelve-hour test came back fine. Tomorrow it is.”
I suddenly felt nothing but sheer terror. The doctor had warned that the C-section would be difficult, and I couldn’t face physical pain. I also worried what my reaction to the baby might be. What if, instead of a burst of maternal love for the daughter who had just come into my life, I started crying for the daughters I had already lost?
While I stared at the puddle of ice cream spreading across the kitchen floor, all the anxiety and guilt and uncertainty of this pregnancy came to a head. When Warren came over, I grabbed his arm.
“Please don’t make me do this,” I said in a hoarse voice.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said as he put an arm around me.
“I don’t want to be cut open again.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said soothingly. “You’ve done this before.”
My friends told me that everything would be fine, cleaned up the messy kitchen, and offered kisses and good wishes. They left and my mother, overcome by her own emotions, disappeared to the basement guest room to go to sleep.
Warren put his hand on my back, a gentle hoist as we headed up the stairs to bed. We crawled under the covers and as he held me, I trembled in his arms. I couldn’t stop my spiraling thoughts. I would go to the hospital in the morning, and who knew what would actually happen? In the scenario everyone else expected, the next time I returned home and got into this bed, my baby would be here with me. After all I had been through, that still seemed too unreal to imagine.
• • •
Kasey Rose Hance came into the world at 10:20 a.m. on October 11, 2011, weighing 6 pounds 13 ounces. She was perfectly healthy, with rosebud lips and long eyelashes that she blinked endearingly for her first look at the world.
I’d had an epidural, so I couldn’t feel most parts of my body. I moaned groggily from whatever sedatives the doctors had given me.
I saw Warren holding her.
“Look, Jackie. Isn’t she great?” He held the pretty baby out to me, but I could hardly take her in. The moment was too overwhelming.
A nurse came in then and took the baby to get cleaned up, and Warren left the operating room with her. Someone wheeled me into the recovery room and people began coming in and out—Jeannine and Isabelle and Melissa were all there, and so were Cortney and Kara from New Jersey, and Laura and Bob from down the street, and Warren’s dad and my mother and I don’t know who else.
I tried to focus but, disoriented from all the pain medication being pumped into me, I couldn’t recognize faces or remember details of why I was in the hospital. My grasp on reality started slipping away.
“Is someone taking care of Oliver?” I asked, forgetting that our dog Oliver had died many months ago. I didn’t ask about our new dog, Jake. Maybe the blur of analgesics had transported me back a few years.
“How is Emma doing?” I asked. “Is Emma okay?”
“Emma’s not here, Jackie. You know that,” Warren said, stunned by the flash of amnesia.
“Wasn’t Emma just born? How is Emma?”
Warren started getting upset, worried about a return of the memory loss I’d suffered after the accident. The nurses promised him that it was just the drugs speaking, and they turned out to be right; an hour later my awareness returned.
I went to a private room and a nurse brought in Kasey. I tried breast-feeding and she took to it immediately. Then the nurse insisted on trying a technique called skin-to-skin, where she placed the naked baby on my exposed chest and wrapped us both together in a blanket. I lay there feeling awkward and uncomfortable as Warren and our friends snapped pictures. But there must have been something to it, because the baby, feeling my body warmth and heartbeat, immediately stopped crying.
As the afternoon wore on, the postsurgical pain became so awful that I clenched my fists in anguish. The nurses administered more drugs through the IV, but nothing seemed to work. In desperation, Warren called the nurse from the delivery who had been generous and gentle and offered to help however she could.
“Someone forgot to unclamp the intravenous, so nothing was getting through,” she said when she came to the room. Warren turned beet-red, furious that I had suffered when it could have been averted.
“This should help,” the nurse said, fixing the line.
But twenty minutes later, I still didn’t feel any relief.
“You shouldn’t be in this much pain,” Warren insisted. He called the pain management team, but they must have had a lot of pain to manage that day, because more than an hour passed before anyone arrived. As we waited, Warren could barely control his anger. Finally at my bedside, the pain team quickly discovered the problem—the epidural needle had fallen out hours earlier. Instead of any medicine going into me, it was collecting in a puddle on my back.
“Everything went wrong?” Warren asked, in disbelief. “The intravenous line wasn’t opened and the epidural had fallen out? How could that be?”
“It’s okay, Warren,” I said as I saw him getting more and more infuriated. “Just be nice to everyone. They’re trying.”
“This shouldn’t have happened! How stupid! You didn’t deserve that!” he roared, wanting to take care of me.
“Relax, I’m okay now,” I promised him.
He wanted to stay the night, but I insisted he go home and get some sleep to relieve his tension. I put the baby in the nursery and tried to do the same. The next few days in the hospital passed smoothly, though we laughed that Warren never stayed a night. One
day, he went with the Floral Park fifth-graders to the foundation’s “Grow With Me” event at the Centennial Gardens. It had become Warren’s favorite program in memory of the girls, but he looked so exhausted when he stumbled into the hospital afterward that I sent him home again. Friday night, when he arrived after work, he seemed to be getting sick, and I insisted he leave one more time.
“I need you healthy when I get home,” I told him.
I felt comfortable in the hospital, well cared for and in control. Several of my friends asked if they should plan to stay over with me when I got home, but I insisted I’d be fine. My mother would be there if I needed backup, and we’d cope. I could handle one little baby.
But the moment we left the hospital on Saturday, I started to panic. Warren came to get me, and a flock of neighbors thronged the house when we arrived. I just wanted to lie down.
“Go rest,” Warren said chivalrously. “I’ll take care of Kasey.”
I went upstairs and started crying, laid low by some combination of postpartum depression and the devastating realization that I had gained one baby only because I had lost three. I’d experienced depression after Katie was born and remembered calling my mother to tell her that I couldn’t possibly handle a third child. But the intensity of my emotion this time was off the charts. I lay in bed, sobbing. I felt both sickened and sickly. I couldn’t function, and my hormones were spiraling out of control. I stared at Kasey Rose and sometimes she looked exactly like Emma as a newborn, sometimes like Katie. Either way, she was here because they weren’t.
By nighttime, Warren finally passed out in fatigue, and I took Kasey with me to another room. As often happens with newborns, she cried regularly during the night, and we stayed up together, both of us inconsolable. I tried breast-feeding her, just to calm her down, but nothing seemed to help. Her cries ripped through me, giving me chills of terror and despair.
I had expected that the sounds of a baby in the house would be a welcome relief after the defining silence of the last two years, but my subconscious mind began playing strange tricks. The new noise of Kasey crying in her crib echoed the haunting sound I still heard of Emma crying in Diane’s car.