Monkey Mama

When my now seven year old daughter, Z., was just a year and a half, and my now six year old son, D., was about five months, I decided to give their Daddy, M., a Christmas gift that included them - a drum, with their handprints on it, along with their grandfather's handprint (M's father) and M's lineage written around the rim. He cherishes this gift above all others to this day.

Today, we added William's handprint to the drum.

Of course, we didn't have it with us when he was born. In our rush to the hospital, hoping against hope that our midwife's doppler was low on batteries, or just old and not picking up our baby's heartbeat, I didn't even think to bring my cell phone. We certainly wouldn't have thought to bring the drum.

So today, we went to the funeral home. And I saw and held my baby boy for the very last time. So still, so perfect, wrapped in the hospital blanket. The funeral director, only slightly taken aback by our strange Aquarian request for his handprint on our drum, brought him to us, and when I took him, when she put him in my arms, my body responded immediately... this was my baby. This was the thing I'd been missing for the past thirty-six hours. This was how it was supposed to be, my baby snuggled against my breast. I had to fight the actual physical urge to run from the room with him, to go to the darkest, most quiet place I could find and rock us both to oblivion.

Funeral homes are so strange. We take everything out of context in our culture. There is no place, anymore, for our babies to be made and then born into our own beds. There is no place, either, for us to wash and mourn them in our own homes if they pass, to curl up alone with our grief and our dead and let our bodies and minds come to some sort of peace. Now, we take it outside of community, outside of life, and we put it all into institutions... hospitals take over birth. Funeral homes take over death.

But the director was kind, and she left us alone with William, and I held his tiny, perfect hand while Daddy painted it blue and pressed it to his beloved drum. And then I carefully cleaned it off, and like a mother cat, even licked my fingers and rubbed the blue color away until his skin was pale white again. Not pink or red, full with life's blood, as it should have been. Pale as a ghost, and no longer there, I know, just a shell of what he would have been.

But he was mine, and I wanted him, more than I'd ever wanted anything. I didn't even care, not consciously, that he was dead. I wanted to steal him away, out of the moment, out of time. I cradled his tiny head in my hand and he still smelled like the soap the hospital used to bathe him, but beneath that, there was still that sweet, newborn smell.

I remembered, a few months ago, seeing a video of a mother ape, cradling her dead newborn baby - a congenital heart defect had taken it from her. And how the world had watched her pain in awe and horror and sorrow on YouTube and said, "Look how human her response is, how she cradles the baby, cares for it as if it's still alive."

Because, for her, it was. I know, monkey-mama, I know. My heart and my pain was no different. My mother-love no less, and no more. It was a basic, biological thing - a necessary thing. This was my baby, this was my heart no longer beating that I was holding dead in my arms, and nothing or no one could ever take that from me.

My son will be cremated some time in the next forty eight hours and all I'll have left are his ashes. But today I held him and kissed his head and said goodbye, and before that letting go...

There was a moment, that timeless time that lasted forever when he somehow filled the hole that had been created by his absence and I knew then that he would always be mine.