5 January
Halcyon went still a couple of days ago and his little body came whole and dead at home last night. Ten countable fingers. Ten adorable toes. A perfect tiny baby made of me and Robin. Ears, and how glad we are, and grieved, to remember that he heard Robin sing. Eyelids closed on a face that undeniably would have looked like his father's, strikingly similar to baby N's. For a resting place, we are burning his name into a little box made by my dad 20 years ago:
Halcyon Tell-Drake
Samhain 2014 - Epiphany 2015
I had gotten up from the couch and was headed to my bedroom, about to tuck in for the evening, planning to meet Robin down there for our usual evening read-together. Since October, we'd been slowly reading through CS Lewis' Space Trilogy after the kids were in bed. The hugeness of the theme of this trilogy suited the hugeness of this time in our life.
I had gotten up from the couch to head to my bedroom, and I felt it. The drop of . . . pray, not blood. I changed course silently, to the bathroom, where I confirmed that it was blood. Robin was right there when I came out but he did not notice my face and I had no words. I went to the bedroom and the bathroom again and the big closet we call our dressing room and I prepared to go to the hospital.
I didn't cry. That morning, I had been half-asleep and fortune-telling, a productive combination, and I had felt the room darken. My beloved dead, four women, were there; My grandmother, Marjorie, my childhood lover and best friend, Jenn, and my dear cousin and playmate, Susan, were standing in the dark looking with sad, knowing eyes at me, while my dog Starry Night ran circles around them, then sat, anticipating. I saw Grandma put her arms down as would do a woman picking up or setting down a toddler. I saw a light in the corner, and saw the baby, and suddenly was frantic to know if the baby was going into the light, out here to me, or was coming in from the light, in to the arms of the waiting beloved dead. That morning, I cried, bawled, lost in hysteria for twenty minutes or more, seeing that vision. Ten hours later, at the first sign of blood, I had no tears.
I sat on the bed and waited for Robin to wrap up his day and come down to read. It was only a few minutes before he was there, I think. I was happy to let time sit still. He called our midwife. We went to the hospital. It was snowy and icy and I worried about the roads, worried that we'd die on the way there, in retrospect, a first symptom of the preoccupation with death that would plague me for the next month.
"They've put us in the trauma room," I whispered to Robin. Posters of characters from Law & Order Special Victims Unit offered us comfort and advice, rape kits were stacked up on one shelf, and there was a private shower. There was a lot of privacy in that big corner room.
The ER nurse was not an ultrasound tech. He didn't know what he was doing and apologized for that over and over. Later Robin and I both confessed to an urge to take the machinery out of his hands and do it our selves. We'd had a number of ultrasounds in the past month. We could see what he was doing differently. Not that he was doing it incorrectly. There, clear as day, on the screen, was our perfect baby, perfectly still.
I did not at first look. I knew I'd see him dead. I didn't want to. I looked instead at Robin's face when the nurse turned on the u/s. I knew Robin's face would tell me, and it did. But then it turned out to be worse to look at your husband looking at his dead child than to look at the child yourself. Robin's eyes closed and his head fell, and I turned and saw our Halcyon floating in his sea, no longer making any waves of his own at all.
We spent a lot of time in the ER before we went home with labor-inducing pills in hand. We went home to do this ourselves.
I wrote later, on a Facebook post where a nursing-student friend was asking for arguments about whether birth can be defined as a medical crisis, one which the body will not resolve with normal coping mechanisms.
That phrase -- "normal coping mechanisms" -- is particularly sticking in my craw. It was just a month ago that the man who is normally my husband rubbed entirely normally my back in the bed we normally are in at that time of night, both of us listening to my body's cues as we both normally do, and flowing with the ones that seemed wise which is the decision-making process we normally follow. Though that baby was dead when labor began, and much too little to be either born or dead, the birth was so healing and unifying specifically because it was four hours in which we were able to apply our normal coping mechanisms and do something we knew how to do (five previous births under our collective belts). Everything else had been a crisis for days, weeks, finding out he was chromosomally weird and then waiting to know if he'd live, but birth was a thing we could do, birth we knew, birth would be, and was, normal. Labor and delivery is normal. It is a thing bodies normally cope with, like eating and pooping or sleeping and waking. It was for me and Robin and our tiny Halcyon the normalest thing we did together.
It was a good birth. We wandered between bed and bathtub. We messaged friends, who were helpful, and watched funny TV when we needed distraction from the physical intensity, and worried and obeyed my body and mourned and loved each other.
In the days after, I found myself mostly speechless, but I kept a running list of things I wanted to remember. It is below, italicized, my notes written today interspersed.
- Bibliomancy with a book on zen, finding this verse about how nice it would be live backwards, to be born old and grow stronger, to retire to the womb for nine months and die someone else's orgasm. Before I was spotting. Just hours before, probably right as Halcyon was dying.
- The friend who knew that I needed to make something to put the body in before I could give birth and release myself from the role of coffin.
My body waited, holding the baby, doing for him all it could ever do again. I feared I would never be able to naturally let go. I feared going to the hospital, where someone who called him not Halcyon but "the product of conception" would scrape him out of me in pieces and never let me bury him let alone even see him. I needed to see my baby, but I couldn't let go. I remain so deeply grateful for the suggestion to sew a shroud, for it was when I picked up needle and thread to begin that my contractions, and Halcyon's birth, really began.
- Robin holding me up in my weird position, how he was impossibly flexible and endlessly strong, when my body gave out in the only working posture, just before the baby finally came.
- Robin looking at Halcyon for the first time. Robin voicing the thought I was having -- look, it's a baby made of you and me, and it has ten fingers and ten toes. A relief.
That thought lingered for so long after. How stunning that we feel pride, joy, love, looking even at the dead body of an unviable child who carries our DNA. How much we did! Robin said it gave him new insight into the story of Tom Thumb, and he imagined how many couples must have invented such stories of how it would have been had their tiny, perfect child lived, thinking, "Okay, I will take you this way, just please live."
- Realizing Robin was not as resilient as me, not about some things.
The month of exciting PTSD flashbacks that would follow the sight of my dead little child also reminded me that I had dealt with this demon before, but he never had; I had patterns in my brain in place for such terrible things, but he had been protected. This created interesting contrast, for in some ways it made me stronger, and it others it made me weaker.
- The friend who, fresh off her own loss, told us the gruesome details of what to expect that no one else would tell us (and brought us cookies from across town at midnight).
I remain so grateful for this friend. What would we have done if she had not been willing to describe the normal physical characteristics of a dead fetus in so much detail?
- The old male attending in the ER who stopped Robin to tell him he was so sorry and that we seemed like such a nice couple. Forty or more years of being an ER doctor and still he felt every loss.
And the first time that phrase, which follows us, "you seem like such a nice couple", didn't feel so blatantly wrong, didn't make me think, "if only you knew."
- The friend who took in B, our only child without an ex to go to, for two sleepover nights in a row so that we could focus on the birth and my body without worrying about grossing out a pre-teen boy.
- The moment when the bedroom's yellow walls glowed like warmth and spun like chariot wheels and I knew that the birthing process had been as good for my sense of what my body could do and what my marriage could do as the loss of this baby had been terrible. And the struggle to keep those two sets of feelings apart so they would not sully each other.
We struggled with what to do after the baby was born. For some hours we could not handle being separated from his body. We slept, and we made some preparations, and we didn't eat, not until we thought to let someone know how hard that was for us right then.
- The woman from the church meal train who brought us dinner and the memories of her own stillborn son, and with that, the relief of understanding that saying this baby's name will be just as important to us in twenty years.
The children came home to the loss of their tiny Halcyon and naturally wanted to see the body. We debated it some, but figured if they felt comfortable, we would let them. He did not look gross. He just looked small. That he was born with his hands covering his eyes, playing peekaboo with life, the universe, and everything, probably made it easier.
- N's unguarded and enthusiastic reaction of "AWWW SO CUTE!", like the bloody fetus of her youngest sibling was a fluffy hamster in a tutu. T digging right into learning something new after a good cry, like his mother, finding comfort in education. B needing to not see, turning quiet. V silently understanding that his contribution to the baby's coffin was important to me.
Later I learned that B had been afraid I would die, as well. He is doing okay now.
- Realizing that I had in my own possession, notes in my own handwriting, all the information I needed on how to do a home funeral and alternative burial, feeling my mortician brain meet my mom brain and the odd feeling of my mom-sense being strengthened by this while my mortician-sense was weakened. The other home-morticians rallying around me, and all of us learning that when it comes to sending loved ones on, "do-it-yourself" is both needful and impossible, and it is the true wisdom of the death midwife to know which parts of it are hers.
- "I was standing by the bedside of a neighbor" became the song that would not leave my head. And how every time I tried to sing it, I cried.
And that when Robin heard me trying, he cried, too, when I came to the part that goes, "Though you have to make this journey now without me..."
- Sitting alone with the baby's body, feeling so grateful to the soul who gave us this time. Cutting up a playsilk for him, one I dyed myself, and nestling his little body into it. The size of his feet, a third of my pinky nail. His perfect tiny feet. Pulling his hands off his eyes, his face, and seeing his nose, his broad smile. Saying thank-you-goodbye, alone with him.
In the end we chose a burial place where we could go and be with him frequently, a place where I often take the children for nature study or just a nice day out-of-doors, a place nearby enough that I can get away to there by myself when I need to mourn.
How slowly Robin moved with that small coffin in his hands. I thought, watching, that he could wind time down, and stop it. Then that even would not do, but he'd have to take us backwards, start time up again from elsewhere. We'd do it again. We'd sing more.
How plainly written in each minute element of Robin's posture, his grip, his glance: I love you, I love you, I love you. As wholly and completely as any father has ever proclaimed it, he did so silently, and silently was fine, for no ears were listening and only a memory of a dream heard him.
And though I was applying everything I'd learned in the last three months of reading up on being a natural-funeral director, it was no comfort to me. I did not feel ready to let go at any point, not even at that last moment, when I found myself thinking,
Little tenacious dancer, tiny impossible one, whatever adventures the atoms and energies of you are on now, you have all these parental willings for goodness to follow you, and they shall not cease. We have to plant what remains in our hands. Bloom, so-loved child, and be used.