In these hours while the dark endures, I hold on to the time that the black skies give me, illuminated only by the stars and the lingering effect of the full blood moon of the eclipse. Until sunrise, Reid is heavy in my arms and perfect in his body. With family surrounding us, and without the reality of the light, I can almost imagine everything is as we’ve dreamed it would be. And in many unexpected ways, it is.
When the sun comes up, the clock will start ticking. We are on borrowed time; Reid has already started to change. But for this moment, in the magic of the night, he is safe in my arms, protected from the harshness of light and time. Reid is simply my baby who has just been born.
4
IT IS STILL early morning, but through the window the darkness is softening. Aaron is holding Reid on the make shift bed beside mine. My parents have stepped out of the room to give us some privacy as our nurse, Rose, does an assessment. She checks my blood pressure first, then massages my uterus to help it contract. As she turns the soft flesh of my empty belly into dough beneath her knuckles, I hear a loud gush of liquid.
“Oh!” she exclaims. She lifts up the sheet to examine what has come out of me and with relief assures me it is just urine. “Do you need to pee?” she asks.
I have to think about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. She looks at me, clearly confused, then checks a screen over my shoulder. It is then that she realizes that the epidural drip has been left running. She mutters a few words under her breath. I say a dozen tiny prayers of gratitude that someone else’s oversight gave me a few more hours free of physical pain.
Rose helps me over to the bathroom and places a basin over the toilet bowl. “You won’t quite know how to do this because you’re still so numb. But it’s mind over matter,” she counsels me. I ask her to run the water, but before she turns the tap my body knows what it needs to do.
Back in bed, I’m overcome with fatigue. Rose asks if we’d like to give Reid a bath. I tell Aaron he can if he wants to; I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute or two. Aaron, looking every bit as tired as I feel, asks Rose if she can do it instead.
“Of course,” she says. She grabs a yellow plastic cup, a basin, and a travel-sized bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo and sets up the bath on the counter across the room from us.
I peer over to her every now and then, watching her carefully rub the soap into Reid’s hair as I drift in and out of half sleep. Later, I will read that it is a ritual in many cultures to cleanse the body of the deceased after they have passed—it’s part of the mourning process. We are only doing what is expected after birth, trying to grasp at any sense of normalcy that we can. But I am glad that he is being cared for this way.
When she is finished, she brings him back over to me. I hold him against my chest and breathe him in.
“Do you want to dress him?” Susie asks, coming back into the room.
We put him in the newborn outfit I’d packed long ago to bring him home in. A white and gray outfit with mittens and a hat and a tiny sweater to match. I struggle to get the onesie over his head—I’ve never dressed a baby before. Susie comes over and holds Reid’s head in place as I pull the fabric down over his face. I study it then, the way it is different from other newborn faces I’ve seen, the way it is changing still.
It feels strange to be able to do these things: weigh and bathe and dress him. As he lies on my lap, it occurs to me that he was a part of me for his whole entire life and now here he is, suddenly separate. I want to repair our bond, to somehow absorb him. I want to find our way back to the time and place where he was alive. I want to be together again.
I always thought, somehow, that death would follow the rules. This was supposed to be a beginning; now we are at an end. In this world we now live in, life-altering things happen with no apparent reason or warning.
The rest of our family members arrive. Aaron’s parents, our sisters and their significant others, my maternal grandmother. They enter our room one by one, and it is torture to look them in the eye. I am keenly aware that had Reid been safely delivered into our arms, this is exactly the scene that would have played out—family and friends gathering at our bedside, only it would have been to welcome our son into the world with celebration. Now, as I realize with my stomach churning, they are coming to us in sorrow. It isn’t fair. And yet seeing Reid in the arms of our loved ones feels right. I only wish more people could be here to hold him.
I watch Aaron hold our son, both pain and pride written on his face, a father’s love for his child bursting into the room. I don’t ever want to forget this moment. My own heart throbs to see how Reid can’t meet his gaze, to grasp that he will never get the opportunity. I think of the God that I thought I believed in and can’t understand why we find ourselves in this reality. Still, I find some comfort in knowing that the first face Reid saw was His. I am sure I only close my eyes again for a minute, but now everyone else is gone and a woman I don’t recognize is at my bedside. The skies are starting to brighten and I know that things will start to move quickly now. The woman introduces herself as the social worker and starts to talk about support groups, funeral arrangements, forms to fill out. I can’t absorb any of it. Reid is still in my arms, wrapped in the swaddle I had packed in his hospital bag months ago. A white swaddle with red, gray, and black details, speckled with bears—I’d forgotten how cute the pattern was. I adjust his body; the weight of him is making my hand go numb. He is right here, in my arms, and this woman is talking about all of these terrible things we’ll have to do when he is “gone.” Gone. I mull that over and continue to nod as she speaks. I don’t care what she is saying; everything she is saying feels wrong anyway. I continue to stare at my beautiful boy as she talks.
“…you won’t get a birth certificate,” I hear her say. “So, here’s the form for the certificate of remembrance that you can get. It’s a really beautiful memento; they do an excellent job.” She taps her pen lightly to her clipboard as if to emphasize that point.
My eyes jump up to meet hers. “Sorry, what did you just say?” I can hear my voice crack as my mind fumbles to process her words.
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” she falters. “You don’t get a birth certificate.”
“We don’t get a birth certificate?” This woman can’t be serious. “But he was born five hours ago. Look at him.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. So sorry. But he didn’t take a breath. So…” she trails off and gives me a pitiful half smile as she looks at my son. “He’s perfect.”
“Yes,” is all I can manage as I choke back the tears, “he’s perfect.”
I wrestle with many things immediately following Reid’s death, but none more than this: What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the time-line in which they occur. It’s unsettling.
When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don’t know. I don’t think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?
The person down the hall from me with a breathing baby to hold will receive a paper, one that confirms that, yes, a birth has taken place. I, however, am only given permission to remember. No proof of birth. No proof of either life or death. It doesn’t make sense that someone in government, someone who doesn’t know me, whom I’ve never met, has the power to decide what this baby means to our family. Nothing makes sense. He is right here in my arms.
At seven thirty, our new day nurse, Ava, comes in to introduce herself. I like her immediately. She is young, but it’s clear that all she wants to do is make the hours we have left with Reid special. She says she will call a photographer to take portraits, if we want. She