Birth Story, Part 3

This is the part I always try to avoid. This is the part where the pain is so exquisite I can't touch it, like air on a third-degree burn.

I started seeing a therapist a week after Balthazar died and at our first session she said, "I don't know what happened, other than that you've had a loss. Tell me what happened."
I told her about finding out. I told her about the labor, and the delivery. Then I started talking about how my parents reacted and how it felt to pick my son up from school and see all of the parents three days out.

If I were writing a novel I would unconsciously skip this part altogether and some editor would gently remind me that it's the most important thing, the heart of the story. This is the part with the dead baby in it.

The OB brought Balthazar to me. He had vernix on his face, which looked like clown makeup. They couldn't wipe it off, they explained, because his skin was fragile and might come off with it. Other than that he looked like a baby. He had dark hair. His nose and mouth were like his brother's. His eyes were closed and looked slightly swollen. He was still warm from being inside my body, but he didn't cry and he didn't move. He was a six pound, eight ounce lump. He was there, but he was not there. He was fully formed, but absent. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but he was gone.

At birth Jasper was already so definitively himself, his right fist held close to his face, over his eye, as a shield, as a comfort, as a way to bash his way out. Who was Balthazar? He was an empty page, a blank. The charity that claims they come and take professional pictures of dead babies never came and so the nurse took the pictures herself. She asked me to kiss his head and I did, feeling guilty about my hesitation. I felt his fragility and his distance and I moved gingerly.

After awhile I gave him to Jonathan to hold. He broke down when he realized that he was unconsciously rocking a baby who had no need of being soothed. "Everyone does it," the nurse, said, unsurprised. "It's an instinct."

He kept pooping. I didn't know that a body could do that, which I guess just shows my ignorance and unfamiliarity with death. The nurse kept trying to wipe him clean, eventually taking a big piece of skin off of his behind. After that she put a diaper on him. But it was horrifying, seeing that happen. My son was injured, wounded. It shouldn't have mattered-after all, he couldn't feel it. But it did matter. The image of it kept me awake at night for weeks-the flap of skin coming off, the raw and damaged flesh.

Later the nurse put him in a bassinet next to my bed. She said that he could stay with us as long as we wanted and so he remained there all night. Once the nurse determined I was not hemorrhaging or feverish she left us alone. There was no way that I could sleep. I read the literature I'd been given like a college student pulling an all-nighter. Jonathan tried to sleep on the padded bench and then at 3 am gave up and went home. I was actually glad, because I needed some time alone with my son.

I told him that  loved him, and that his Daddy loved him, and how sorry we were that we wouldn't get to take him home. I apologized and said I had tried my best. I told him that I knew he had tried his best.

Before Jasper was born, I had a miscarriage at ten weeks. After the D&C the gynecologist told us that it hadn't been a fully formed embryo. It hadn't even made a yolk sac. Once we were over our initial shock and sadness, Jonathan and I used to joke grimly about the poor showing of that pregnancy. "Couldn't even make a yolk sac," we'd say to each other in mock disgust. But this was an entirely different thing.

What did he feel? What did he know? Was he scared? Do feelings and thoughts even obtain for someone who has never existed outside the womb? Can someone who doesn't know where he is or what is happening be scared? The questions would be impossible to answer even if we knew why he died, which we don't.

We would always love him, I said, and we would always be his mommy and daddy. There was really nothing else to say after that. Love was all I had to offer him. 

In the morning Jonathan came back with the hospital bag I hadn't been able to bring. The nurse helped me to dress Balthazar in a gray and white striped hanna andersson onesie and gray wiggle pants-his going home outfit. I wrapped him in a blanket from Churchill Weavers in Louisville, Kentucky, one my aunt's partner had given me when Jasper was born. The blanket was a beautiful cornflower blue.

Another minister came and sat with me, and I have a lot to say about that in another post. Then the geneticist came and looked over Balthazar. He had wild mad scientist hair and and wore corduroys and sandals with socks. He said that based on his examination he could see nothing wrong, but he took a tissue sample to do a chromosomal analysis.

By then I was dressed. We had signed the papers giving the hospital permission to perform an autopsy. We had called the funeral home and arranged for him to be cremated. And so, fourteen hours after he was born, we had to leave him.

I knew it would be the hardest thing, and it was. I was worried that they might not treat him carefully or respectfully. I was afraid they might not put his clothes and blanket back on him after the autopsy. All of that, though, was out of my control. I tried not to look at the body bag that was waiting for after we left. But it was time to leave. Our short moment together was necessarily limited by the exigencies of biology. His body was breaking down and no amount of time in the hospital with him could change that.

Our living son hadn't seen us in 30 hours. So we did the only thing we could do, and went home to him.