William's Birth Story 3: Hello, Goodbye

Why had I been so afraid of him? Afraid to see him, touch him, even think of him, after I knew he was gone? Death scares us so much, that constant reminder. We're mortal. We live, we die. We're transient, our time here so short.

But he was beautiful, so very perfect. He looked just like his daddy, and had the most hair of any of my babies. (All that heartburn! Oy! Wives tale or no, he sure had a lot of hair!) Everyone said how beautiful he was. So bittersweet. Tiny little man - he reminded me of his sister, with her long limbs and fingers. He got that from me. That, and his perfect little mouth. Everything else was all his daddy.

I held him and kissed him and whispered sweetness into the tiny curved shell of his ear. He was warm from my body, but I knew he was gone. Gone. He would never hear me call him my sweet little man or turn his head and seek the comfort of my breast. He would never open his eyes, and I would never see if they were dark and deep like his daddy's. How could this have happened? I whispered that, over and over, "Oh baby, I'm so sorry, what happened? What happened?"

When I handed him to M. and saw the look on his face, I thought my heart would break in half. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I knew it was my fault somehow. My body had broken him, our baby. It hadn't kept him safe. I was a horrible mother, I had failed my baby, my husband, my children. Our perfect little boy, our nine-month dream, was gone, and I blamed no one but myself.

The doctor asked me - I'd almost forgotten she existed - to push the placenta out. I didn't want to. It hurt too much. I told her so, and she said, "Well, I don't want to pull on the cord," and that was enough to motivate me. I pushed out his placenta, deeply stained with meconium. He'd been in stress, that much was obvious, or he'd been gone a while. How long? I wondered. What was the last thing he heard? Felt?

Having a wonderfully overactive imagination isn't all that great at times like these. I can imagine perfectly well what it might have been like in the darkness for him, losing consciousness, losing his life. And all the while, I was oblivious. The one person in the world who was connected to him, who was entrusted to love him, protect him, keep him safe. And I couldn't do it. My body betrayed me. My baby died in the very cradle of my womb and became nothing more than a watery grave.

The doctor announced I had an intact perineum and cleaned me up. She said she wanted to send the placenta in for examination, and we agreed. Then the nurses asked if they could take William, give him a bath, take his picture. I nodded. It didn't matter, did it? I wanted him with me, but I wanted him alive. That wasn't going to happen. Ever.

Another nurse encouraged me to get up, take a shower. Numbly, I did. I hate hot showers - I'm very temperature sensitive - but I couldn't feel it that night. I watched my skin turn red - the nurse said she turned it on full hot to get it warm, warned me I might need to adjust to make it cooler - but I couldn't feel it. I washed. I washed until I thought my skin would slough off, just like my baby's had. I wanted to be dead, too. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw his face.

He was clean, dressed and wrapped up when the nurse brought him back in. Five pounds, four ounces, she said. Eighteen inches long. Almost exactly the size of our daughter when she was born. The nurse was sweet - so young, her eyes done up with glitter make-up, she reminded me of a fairy or an angel - and seeing her carrying my dead baby in to me was like waking up into some sort of surreal dream. This couldn't be my life. This couldn't be happening. The nurse showed us the pictures she'd taken, quite proud of the job she'd done. And I praised her. They were lovely. She'd done a wonderful job. But it wasn't much of a consolation for a dead baby.

I was supposed to be in my birth tub at home. I was supposed to be lifting my baby to my breast, hearing him wail, feeling him kick his little legs on the outside now instead of the inside. We were supposed to be saying our cord cutting prayer before Daddy cut his cord with his special knife, the knife he would pass on when William was old enough to know and understand what it meant. We were supposed to be taking off the bracelets we made, the ones we'd been wearing for weeks, waiting his arrival.

I was still wearing mine. So were the kids. I remembered them, and M. had the midwife bring the kids back in, and my niece-in-law, S. had tears in her eyes as she took pictures of our little family, still only four instead of five, even though William was there, cradled in my arms. He was gone from us, and would never reach for and pull his sister's hair or throw his sippy cup off his high chair tray and make his older brother pick it up again...and again.

Our daughter, Z., held him and exclaimed over how perfect and adorable he was. And I thought my heart couldn't break any more. Our six-year-old son, D., skipped sad and went straight to angry. "I don't want to hold that," he said. I winced. "Are you sure? You won't get another chance," I reminded him gently. He sat in the chair, folded his arms across his chest, and scowled as his sister cooed over her little brother.

Finally, D. crept onto the bed and held out his arms. I put William in them, and the words, "Careful," came out of my mouth just on reflex as I protected William's little head. But there was no reason, was there? He was gone - he wasn't feeling any of this. We were feeling it all, and it was pain beyond pain. D. cried and kissed him and I thought the world might end, right then and there. I wished it would. Seeing my living son cradle my dead one? I never, ever want to see anything like it again.

We took off our bracelets, and put them in the box the nurse had left us. Little blue box with his pictures in it. A keepsake box. I was going to be one of those mothers with a tragedy put away in my closet. I imagined myself packing it the next time we moved. And the time after that. Instead of a growing baby, a child, I would move a box of things from place to place. It was too horrible to think about for long.

S. went home, then, and soon after, our midwife went home, too. The nurses said we could spend as much time with William as we wanted, but it was midnight now, and our living children were tired - over tired - and it was time to go home. Two hours after he'd been born, we were leaving the hospital without him. They took him away, undressed him and packed his clothes into my little blue box. They included a lock of his hair, his hospital bracelet, a card with his name, the date, his weight and length. And they had us pick a funeral home - we just took their suggestion. Did it really matter?

Was anything ever going to matter again, I wondered?

And then we went home. I carried a blue memory box instead of a baby, and I tucked two children in that night instead of three. There was no baby moving in my belly, no baby next to me in the co-sleeper. M. wanted to move the tub out of the bathroom, take down the co-sleeper, but I said no. Not tonight. Not now. He asked about William's things. Such a pragmatic, masculine question. What were we going to do with them - his clothes, the nursery - but I couldn't talk about that. Not yet.

M. lit a candle for William, and it burned into the night. I resented that candle, that flickering flame, a memorial for the baby I would never hold again. I didn't want a candle, or condolences, or a blue box to put in my closet. In the morning, that candle was a fat, solid wax puddle on the plate, spilled over and burned out, and it was exactly how I felt. In the morning, William was still dead, I was still alive, and our lives were changed forever.