Holding Silvan Read online

  But there was a complicating factor in all of this and if I go right back to the moment when he asked me out for that first date, I can see where I fell for him. When David approached my chair at work that day, my brother Mark was already dead and my father was already feeling ill and David was just a handsome young man who’d only ever lost a grandfather. Still I liked the way, when I said that catching a movie that particular weekend might be difficult because of a memorial mass scheduled for my brother who’d killed himself nine months before, he did not flee. When I told him the mass might be cancelled because we needed the priest to come up to the house to do a “laying on of the hands” to heal my father of cancer, he still did not flee. Instead, he went down on one knee at my swivel chair, and asked me to tell him more. He looked me full in the eyes. He said, “That must be hard.”

  He was a rational skeptic, and a young man, but he knew how to listen. He listened as I tried to describe grief. He listened as I tried to describe my sense of something greater than ourselves, a sense of our souls returning to some mysterious whole. He listened as if he understood that it did not matter what I believed about death so long as I believed in something. No, it wasn’t that. He listened as if by listening he could make my suffering easier to bear.

  Making This Easier

  “WHAT WILL MAKE THIS EASIER FOR YOU?” DAVID asks.

  We are lying in bed on the fourth morning after Silvan’s birth. We feel as if we have not stopped moving since my water broke during dinner, and our minds are swirling with diagnoses and prognoses. The doctors now know that Silvan suffered oxygen deprivation. They know this insult to his brain happened during labor or delivery, but they don’t know exactly when or how. I wish I could help, but when I think back to my labor, those sixteen hours, everything seemed normal and natural. My water breaking, tickling my legs, the contractions starting within minutes; the drive to the hospital, my water clear, the baby fine; walking the hospital halls, sitting on a birthing ball, picturing the push and pull of ocean waves, dozing between each contraction; and though I’d felt in the grip of something powerful and mysterious, I’d felt confident. Only once did my confidence waver, when I woke to see that David had left his post by my bed. “What are you doing?” I asked in alarm as if I could not survive the next contraction without him.

  “I’m just putting on my shoes.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. My feet are cold.”

  The nursing notes corroborate this picture: “husband and doula are supportive,” the notes say; and I am laboring “well.”

  Now the doctors continue to analyze this simple narrative. I wore a fetal monitor strapped around my belly to monitor the baby’s heart rate. This is standard practice, an attempt to catch distress such as Silvan was in. I know that some of my friends who labored at home are skeptical of hospital monitoring. They believe that midwives do a better, more human job of monitoring, and yet one of these friends now remembers a story of a home birth ending in an inexplicable stillbirth. Now the doctors go back to the monitor tracings, but they find nothing unusual. When I admit that I had hated the feel of the monitor belt around my belly so much that I had begged the nurses to take it off—there it is, a gap of two hours in the nursing notes while I stand in the shower—the doctors say that for a normal labor like mine, they usually monitor intermittently anyway. Nor do they know what to say about the last kick I felt in the shower, a big kick as if Silvan were stretching out inside of me with all his strength. A baby’s kick is usually a good sign. What’s strange to them instead is how the damage doesn’t show up anywhere else but in Silvan. We learn about cord blood gasses and placentas, neither of which showed signs of damage. Nor did the tests right after birth show much more than lethargy. All they know for sure is that the damage happened during labor, because the brain swells within twenty-four hours of such an injury. Perhaps this is why, though he nursed, he could not stop crying. Because something unseen was already wrong.

  BUT NONE OF this is enough to make sense of what is happening. No medical information can. There’s something else I need—and when David asks in bed what will make this easier, I know what it is. “I want people to see him, my baby,” I say. In that moment, the miracle of Silvan is that he is mine, that he came out of me, and I am flooded with a maternal pride of possession.

  We begin by inviting Margie and Gavin. David has known these two since college, since before they were a couple, and I have known them since I met David, right before they fell in love. They seem entwined with us as a couple. We’ve taken swing dancing lessons with them (David dropping Margie on her head), vacationed with them, we’ve planned our weddings together, and nine months before us, they gave birth to their own first child. Nine months before, we’d gone off eagerly to see Margie and Gavin and their newborn son Oscar, and after David saw Margie, still swollen and exhausted but rushing around full of her characteristic glee and good humor with a babe in arms, David said to me with his usual blunt honesty, “I can’t really picture you having what it takes to be a mother.” We were approaching a curve on the freeway when he said this, me at the wheel, and I felt enraged. This was the same curve where I’d felt myself losing control six years before (a late driver, I was taught by David) and he had reached over calmly to put a steady hand on the wheel. This time, our roles were reversed. In that moment on the freeway, I knew I was pregnant. While he anxiously reminded me that I was a writer and that writing was selfish, I felt already changed. I felt equal to this rushing curve ahead. “I’m going to be a mother,” I said, rounding the curve with competence, “with you or without you.” Already the hormones were kicking in, making me this angry, this weepy, this full of my own defiant sense of power. In this state, David’s familiar honesty felt intolerable. He asked how I could be so certain I was pregnant. “I just know,” I said, “so you’d better practice saying only nice things to me from now on.” He grinned. We were getting off the freeway now, both of us grinning, and I let go of the steering wheel for a moment to take his hand as if I’d been driving this well all my life.

  When we arrive at the hospital, Margie and Gavin are already waiting for us in the hall. Oscar is not with them and for a moment, I am hugely disappointed. I had wanted this spark of life and hope. But Margie says her sister-in-law thought it would be better for me if I didn’t have to deal with someone else’s child. And I realize she is probably right. They have dropped everything, including Oscar, for this moment with us.

  David takes Gavin in to see Silvan while Margie and I go into the little waiting room. It is dark and done in beige, and covered with blankets and pillows and crumpled magazines from all the parents who’ve camped out the night before. It is ugly and grim.

  I try to explain to Margie what little I know in a hushed voice so I don’t disturb the woman a few chairs down with her swollen face and eyes tilted vacantly up at the TV. She has just come from the Bad News Room, as we now call that room where we met with the neurologist, so I know she’s a fellow sufferer. Now I have to tell Margie how bad the situation is, how this is not something that Silvan will recover from after a few days in hospital the way the babies of friends have always recovered until now. “He was perfectly healthy,” I say. “I had a natural labor, it all seemed totally fine. He came out looking perfect to me.”

  “So what happened?” she asks.

  “They don’t know. He’s got severe hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy,” I say, stumbling over the words, “which basically means he was deprived of oxygen for long enough that his central nervous system was damaged. Maybe there was a clot in his placenta. Or a clot in him. Or maybe he grabbed his own umbilical cord so hard he killed his own brain.”

  “A baby can do that?”

  “A really strong baby, I guess. He’s very healthy. They keep telling me how healthy he is. His lungs. His heart. They say I took really good care of him in utero.” I look over at the woman watching TV. She isn’t listening to us, but it is too awful, too much like the de
ath of my brother Mark, this inexplicable death by asphyxiation, as if my healthy son has chosen to hang himself. Relatives of the woman watching TV look in through the doorway at Margie and me, then beckon the woman out into the hallway where they huddle miserably under the fall of bright lights to confer. We are left blessedly alone in the dim, stagnant room.

  I tell Margie what else I don’t know. I tell her that in most cases of severe asphyxia the exact time and cause are never determined. I tell her that, though pregnant women are told that asphyxia “never happens” anymore, it still happens to varying degrees in ten percent of all births. Then I tell her about the range that the neurologist has given us. It is this that is the worst. “He might be so damaged he can’t breathe on his own, or he might be only mildly retarded. He might die in a few days, or he might live with us until we die. And David’s freaking out on me.” This is the first time I talk to someone about how David and I are doing. Since the moment David saw Silvan across the delivery room from me, so like a dying patient surrounded with equipment and doctors, David has been suffering. Now he wants answers. He needs to understand so that he can act. In his anxiety to know what the future holds, we no longer seem to be handling the speed of this car together but have rounded that curve on the highway to find a wall. Our differences are coming out, his desire for certainty and my tolerance of mystery are clashing. “What if my marriage can’t survive this?”

  Margie goes down on one knee by my chair. Her voice is very low and intimate. “I want you to know that no matter what happens,” she says, “we are here for you and David, and that if you have a brain-damaged child, I will love him and my child will love him, I will make my children be Silvan’s friend and we will treat him as part of our family.” Margie is from a big, Catholic family, thirteen children; she knows about family obligation. For a moment, there is no one in the world but us carried along by the force of her speech which is so beautiful and passionate and nearly impossible.

  “But you can’t force someone to love someone else,” I finally say.

  “I know,” she says, tears coming.

  My tears come too. I sob, sobbing almost with relief that we can cry like this together, this friend whom I’ve known only in good times. The most serious conversation I can remember having had with her until this moment is about her unexpected desire to give her child a Catholic baptism even though she no longer practices any religion. “Anyway, he might not even survive,” I say now.

  “Would it be better for him to die on his own?”

  How relieved I am that she is someone who can use that word “die.” How hard to use that word in conjunction with a baby. How wrong in a world where most babies survive. But I am beginning to suspect that he has been trying to do just that since the moment of his birth. To die. I nod.

  She says, “That feels so strange to hope for.”

  I Hope Mommy Dies

  WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, WALKING UP THE HILL TOWARD home after school, or lying in my narrow bed at night, I would think, “I hope Mommy dies.” With these words, I tried to relieve the pressure of my dread, to speak the unspeakable, that primal fear, the starting point of fairytales. I wanted to trick whoever might be listening: a god, a genie. I wanted to be spared that inevitable loss by pretending not to care. But there must have been fascination, too; for though my mother remained mercifully alive, I hoarded other deaths. I spent time with my fly, his upside-down legs in the air; I collected the shells left behind by snails starting with the big, understandable ones and working down to a shell as small and translucent as a baby’s fingernail. It seemed somehow important to do this, to pay attention to death, as if I could grow into the deaths that would be most painful.

  The first human death in my life was remote. It happened to an old man named Maurice in a bank in England. Uncle Maurice as I called him was not really my uncle, nor did I know him well, but a few months before he died I had spent a week with my mother and my youngest brother Kim in England at the flat of my grandmother Chmum. Maurice was Chmum’s good friend, tall and stooped and very bald. From these simple features, I recognized him again years later in a photo album in France. My mother and I were in the apartment that Chmum had settled into in old age. We had just returned from a day spent at the nursing home where Chmum was dying, and I was pregnant. The night before flying to France, I’d found out. “Don’t tell anyone,” David had said because he wanted time to adjust. So there we were, my mother and I, in an apartment in France surrounded by someone else’s possessions. The first picture album I flipped through was a black-and-white trip around France, after my grandparents separated, after their children were grown-up and gone. Chmum and Maurice sitting on a split-rail fence; beside their shadows wavy on a cobblestone street; leaning against a square, black car. Their faces looked the same day by day, but Chmum’s hair changed, sometimes quite extravagantly, in one photo its perfect waves piled up like a hat.

  Thinking there must have been someone else along to have taken so many pictures, I was pleased to find the photographer at last, first in a shadow on the ground, then standing on the other side of Chmum. Opening a second album, I found this man again, the same hooked nose and thick eyebrows, this time on the edge of a crowd.

  “Dédé,” my mother said when I asked. Short for André. Chmum’s dead brother.

  I knew André only from a smiling portrait in a round frame that always stood on a shelf wherever Chmum lived, first in England, then in her native France where she returned to live at the end.

  “He doesn’t look so good,” I said.

  My mother examined the photos.

  “You’re right,” she said. “This is his last trip to England, right before he found out about the cancer.”

  He looks a little pale, a little swollen, but more than that: whereas the rest of the party are smiling at the camera, he is smiling but not really looking out; he stands at the edge of the frame.

  This makes me realize that there was in fact a death prior to Maurice’s that happened in my childhood, but that one never counted because I only met André once, when he was already dying, when dying was his only role. We’d flown to Paris as a family – to see him? or was this trip already planned? – where the children, me, Mark, Katya (Kim not yet born, not yet come to our family from the orphanage in Korea) were given paper and colored pencils and settled in the small living room on a patterned rug to draw. I was very young, so young that death was still something that you did for fun and then recovered from, but we were told to draw pictures for Dédé to “cheer him up,” so we did. Every now and then the colors on our paper were so exhilarating, or the strain of being still so overwhelming that we whooped aloud and someone, usually my father, would come out to hush us because death, apparently, was something that liked quiet in order to arrive.

  Finally, our pictures done (the pictures to cheer Dédé up), we were told to take them to him. The room, as I recall, was darkened. The furniture was of heavy, dark wood. There was a bed with a person in it; but most vivid in my memory is my outrage that this dying man did not meet his end of the bargain, but only lay there. We’d made pictures for him. We were children. Children cheered adults. But he clearly was not interested in us or our pictures of sunny suns over smiling houses. He did not order the curtains back and the children up onto the bed to play “tent” under the sheets as we were used to doing on Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings, once my father knew he couldn’t put us off any longer, he would make such tents, propping up the sheets with his long legs. But Dédé just lay there unsmiling. I don’t know if Dédé died then, or later when we were gone, but I never thought much about him again.

  Maurice, on the other hand, had acted delighted by us children, and so I was loyal to him. That summer before he died when I spent time in England, Kim was two and his favorite phrase was “I do dat” and this tickled Maurice. And so the memory of Maurice brings back the memory of childhood, too; it brings back me and Kim in his bowl haircut and his little blue-checked shorts with the
matching button-down shirt. Each morning of that visit, Chmum let Kim toddle down the hall to fetch the milk that the milkman left by her door. Though my mother was worried that he would spill the milk and release Chmum’s sharp tongue, Chmum said merely, “Be careful Kimbo;” and when he tripped one morning and the aluminum top popped off along with the plug of cream, and milk sprayed the length of the beige carpeted hall, she said only, “Don’t cry, Kimbo-bim,” and cleaned it up as though the milk had been delivered for that purpose.

  At any rate, Uncle Maurice adopted “I do dat” for himself.

  On the day he died, soon after we’d returned home from England, Chmum had a check that needed depositing. “I do dat,” he said and set off to the bank where he died while standing in line.

  Shortly after getting the news, I went to the bathroom. Unlike our shared bedrooms, the bathroom must have been the only truly private place in a house with four children. It had a lock and, though the tongue of the lock rattled loosely in the doorjamb whenever someone tried to get in, the door held fast. I remember sitting on the toilet and telling myself the story. “I do dat,” I repeated. I saw Uncle Maurice standing in line, a big bald man slightly stooped, thinking that he was doing “dat” for Chmum. I pictured him keeling over. I thought about the other people in line, four or five of them, turning to see him on the polished floor. I thought what a shock it must be to see someone collapse like that. Although in retrospect I wonder if my grandmother told my mother this story about the bank to show her guilt that she’d let him do this errand for her, or her bitterness that life comes down to dying on the floor in a bank amongst strangers, at the time I believed it was a good story, his little gift to make us feel better.