A Great Big Love

by Alona Jarden

  A dietitian my mother took me to once explained to us that new fat cells break down more easily than old fat cells that accumulated over many years. She also noted that sometimes, it is easier for men to lose weight than women.

  According to my body's reactions to my two attempts to lose weight, she appeared to be right.

  Twice I tried and managed to reach the target weight I set for myself without too much difficulty, but not long after, the reality of my life hit me again and reminded me that there was no one in my life who was worth the effort.

  This is why I decided to indulge myself in everything that made me happy like pizza or a meatball sub, and with the help of those delightful foods, I wrapped myself again in layers of comforting fat cells.

  I think that because losing weight was so easy for me, it was harder to get my cooperation on the matter. Just knowing that if one day I choose to return to my original reflection in the mirror, it wouldn’t be difficult, was probably the reason for that day never happening.

  I left the support group that day very disappointed and went straight back to my house.

  I had spent almost three years hating to go back to that house, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to move away or to even change its interior design.

  Almost three years had passed during which it was as if time had stopped, and returning home was painful as hell.

  My psychologist claimed that this was why I didn’t go out much, and my mother claimed that I was just a coward. I guess they both were right on some level.

  "You never showed up." I exhaled in frustration and sat down on the stairs leading to the door of my big empty house. "I wanted to see your gaze again so much, but you never showed up." A familiar teardrop puckered up in the corner of my eye. "Don't you know I'll do anything to be able to see you again? I'll come out, I'll come back, I'll drive, and I'll even fly. I'll do anything to look into your eyes again."

  I continued to have yet another one-sided conversation with Sarah, my late wife, and the memory of that awful day started playing in my head again.

  The day when everything lost its flavor.

  "Ahhhhhhhh, Don, come on, aahhhhh!" Sarah screamed in deafening intensity.

  "I'm coming, I'm coming." I quickly picked up my cell phone and headed to the kitchen to stock up on some snacks before leaving the house.

  "What are you doing?" She uttered every word of her question with a painful cry.

  "I'm not doing anything. Here I am!" I gave up trying to find something worth eating and joined her at the front door. "I'm here. Let's go."

  "Oh, my God." She squeezed my arm. "It hurts like hell, Don."

  "I know, my beautiful, but today we're finally going to meet our firstborn son!" I smiled at her in admiration for bearing the fruit of our love.

  "Ehhhhhhhhh!" Another cry of pain was released from her weary body, and a pool of fouled water poured from between her legs onto our “Welcome” mat.

  "Okay... That's disgusting." I looked down at the greasy puddle and smiled at her.

  "Shit. I'm not ready. Isn't it too soon? It can't already be happening, can it, Don?" Her face looked frightened. "I'm scared."

  "Obviously." I widened my smile. "You're going to push something the size of a watermelon out of a very small hole that has so far contained the girth of a sausage."

  "Don!" She punched me in the shoulder but smiled in amusement.

  "I know, I know." I locked the door behind us and turned to her. "My sausage doesn't match the size of a watermelon, but I agree that it certainly could have stretched your—"

  "I swear, Don. If you don't stop talking, I'm going to kill you."

  "Would you rather I lie and say that giving birth is going to be really easy and pleasant?"

  "Yes!" She leaned on me as we walked down the stairs to my car.

  "So let me tell you that our firstborn son's birth is going to be short and painless. In fact, you're not going to feel a thing. Just like you didn't feel his creation in the first place."

  "Do – not –make – me – laugh!" She forcefully squeezed my hand and writhed in pain as another contraction cramped her body.

  The songs that played on the radio were a blessed respite between Sarah's cries of pain and her curses for me. Even my attempts to make her laugh were quickly declared as a complete failure.

  "You've got to stop acting like that, Sarah. You hate being called a typical woman, don't you?" I teased her.

  "Don, I'm warning you. It's a very fine line you're walking on." She gasped for air at the end of a big contraction, about ten minutes before we entered the hospital parking lot.

  "It's such a cliché to curse the husband while having a baby. I mean… Think carefully, Sarah. Who else is responsible for this situation? Is there anyone else in this car you can point your accusing finger at?"

  "I'm not angry with the person responsible for my situation. I'm angry with the person who thinks it's funny."

  "Oh. So, in that case, I'm it. Go ahead. Curse me, my beautiful wife. Curse me all you want because this..." I gestured toward her huge belly and looked back at the road, "I can't help it. It's hilarious!"

  I dropped Sarah off at the entrance and hurried to find somewhere to park. Only after closing the car door did I allow myself to be filled with excitement, and I even shed a happy tear for the future to come.

  I was Don Denver, the black sheep of the family, the most screwed up kid of the class, and the bad boy on campus. This crazy dude is going to be a father! I was about to be a father! It was a simply unthinkable concept!

  When I finally got to the maternity ward, Sarah was already lying on one of the beds, and her stomach was attached to all sorts of electrodes. One of the nurses explained to me that they were recording the strength of the contractions, tracking the fetal heartbeat, and testified to the approaching birth.

  "Well, hello there, Daddy." A lovely nurse with a name tag that said “Tina” was the first to officially call me that.

  "Hello yourself, Tina. What are you doing here on such a beautiful day?"

  "Oh, I like him already." She glimpsed at Sarah and returned to chat with me. "Well, Daddy, I'm here to take care of your lovely wife while you go to the registration office and fill out all the necessary forms. I need their stickers so that I can open Sarah's file properly."

  "Any specific stickers, or will any kind do?"

  "What?" She looked confused.

  "I'm just trying to understand if you want something in the line of 'Hello Kitty' or are you more of an Arianna Grande kind of woman?"

  "Sweetie," Sarah gasped, holding her stomach. "Get the fuck out and come back quickly, or I swear I'm having this baby without you!"

  I didn't dare answer or add another witty remark about her hurtful comment, although some great comebacks came to mind. Instead, I hurried to do as I was asked and took my place in line for the registration desk.

  I gave the young girl who was sitting there Sarah's details and mine, received the yellow stickers I was asked to obtain and returned skipping to the maternity ward.

  "Um... Where's my wife?" I asked one of the nurses there.

  "What's her name?"

  "Sarah Denver."

  "Wait here. I'll check for you." She clicked on the keyboard and looked at the screen in front of her. "She was taken to room six, cutie. Your baby's coming."

  "Room six?"

  "It's right down the hall and to the right."

  "All the way to the end and then right, right?" I asked while already walking in that direction.

  "Yes, and good luck, Dad!"

  I almost bumped into the doorway as I turned to take a prideful bow toward her, then switched to running until I reached room number six.

  "I've held up my ends of the deal. I brought stickers, now you do yours. Where's my son?" I pushed my head through a small slot that opened at the door of the delivery room.

  "Don... Don... My God, Don..." Sarah seemed to be having trouble breathing. "Don... It hurts... Sweetie.
.. I think I'm going to die!" She finished with yet another intense cry of pain that sent shivers down every part of my body.

  "What can I do to help, Tina?" I hurried to stand beside my wife.

  "Everything is progressing according to plan, you guys," Tina replied calmly, taking away the yellow stickers I brought, and filling out a few forms in the corner of the room. "The contractions are regular, there's a nice cervical dilation and about fifty percent effacement."

  "Fifty percent?" I was impressed as I understood the meaning of the number from my Google research. "Does that mean we are fifty percent away from giving birth?"

  "It means we're progressing really nicely," She smiled and went back to her forms.

  I gently stroked Sarah's face, and she rested her cheek on my palm.

  I wanted to take away the burden of birth from her so badly, or at least do something that would bring her relief and the feeling of helplessness felt just as painful to me as those birth pains she was experiencing, though I didn't dare telling her that, for fear of getting my head chopped off with a furious bite.

  "Wow, wow, what was that?" Tina suddenly jumped over to the monitor attached to Sarah's stomach. "Don’t make any problems, baby," she said, looking over the string of paper the machine had spat out.

  "If he's anything like Dad, he's going to cause a lot of trouble." Sarah widened her eyes, and fake smiled at me.

  "Come on, sweetie. What's up with you in there?" Tina mumbled ignoring us.

  She continued talking to the sheet of paper, and at the same time, she placed her hand on Sarah's protruding navel.

  "What's going on? Is everything okay?" I frowned anxiously.

  "I believe so, but there are irregular drops in the fetal heartbeat. I'll call the doctor to make sure that it's nothing to worry about, okay?" Tina replied and immediately left room number six.

  "I know you, missy." I turned quickly to Sarah. "You have all sort of horror scenarios playing in your head, right?"

  "Right." Her chin quivered, and tears began to flow down her beautiful face.

  "Enough now, honey. It's nonsense. You know in your heart that there's nothing wrong. Don't get hysterical because you're driving this criminal inside you crazy, too."

  "If you know me as well as you really should, you know I can't help it."

  "But it's nothing, Sarah. Worst case scenario, they'll do a C section. That's all. Other than that, what can possibly happen?"

  "And then what? I would have to go through labor and still be stuck with an ugly scar across my stomach for the rest of my life?"

  "Well… If you think about it, it's actually a good idea. At least your birth canal will stay as is, and your husband won't have to look for some younger and tighter women."

  "Idiot." She rolled her eyes at me.

  "Half full, sweetie. The glass is half full. Think about it for a moment and understand what your husband is trying to tell you."

  "Who's trying to tell me something? Ahhh... You mean my future ex-husband?" She laughed out loud just as the door opened, and the on-call doctor came calmly through it.

  "Well, hello to the smiling parents."

  "Hello!" we answered in chorus.

  "My name is Dr. Klein, and I’m the on-call doctor in the maternity ward tonight."

  "Very nice to meet you," Sarah gasped as another painful contraction began, at least according to the numbers that had begun to rise and climb on the monitor screen.

  "Oh, I see that the contractions are regular and of good quality." He tilted his head to the side as he spoke to her, then quickly picked up the paper coil emitted from the device, and kept quiet for a few seconds, as he looked at the findings.

  I didn’t buy the smile that Sarah had stretched on her face for a moment. I knew she was going crazy, but I didn't know if I had the ability to calm her down.

  She always saw the danger in every situation while I, on the other hand, always believed that things had a tendency to work themselves out.

  She saw the possibility of a Caesarean as a failure or a cancellation of her natural, drug-free, birth plan, but I saw our entire stay in the hospital as a meaningless detail that would be erased from our memory two days after returning home with our firstborn son.

  I guess that's why I was able to keep it together at that moment. I just knew everything was going to be okay. All I had to do was wait for her to see it for herself and believe it with me.

  "Is everything okay, Sarah?" Dr. Klein sat down beside her.

  "It hurts, but I think everything is fine."

  "Good, good." He nodded in agreement. "So, I'm here to tell you that everything really is fine. It's fine now, and it'll be fine later too."

  "I have a feeling you're hiding some 'but' in there..." She squinted at him.

  "But..." He laughed lightly. "I want to be one hundred percent sure that everything really is fine. I don't want to take any unnecessary risks."

  "What does that mean?" I asked curiously as I, too, believed in his attitude in life.

  "It means that in the last ten minutes, there were some worrying pulse drops to your sweet unborn child. Right now, I don't see any real distress, but I also don't want to wait until one arrives."

  "So, what do you suggest we do?" Sarah asked him to be explicit, which was what he was trying to avoid.

  "I suggest you take a deep breath and agree to a Caesarean, Sarah."

  She cried for a good ten minutes.

  I felt that she was mourning the idea of the birth she had in mind, and I gave her the time she needed to understand that there was no reason to argue with Dr. Klein.

  "And will Don be in the operating room with me?" She was still trying to get a sense of control over the situation.

  "If it's really important to you, I will try to arrange it, but I strongly recommend that you decide against it. In the case of planned surgeries, there's no problem for the father to accompany the delivery, but in cases of an emergency C section, the recommendation is—"

  "An emergency?!" she interrupted him loudly and went on shouting, "Just a moment ago, you said everything was fine, and now you say it's an emergency C section?!"

  "Sarah, it doesn't matter anymore." He ignored her attempt to make him explain the situation better. "We decided on a Caesarean, and that's the right decision. Now you have one more right decision left to make, and that’s to say goodbye to your husband for a short time. After that, you'll give birth to your son safely, and we'll all be able to laugh about this conversation for the rest of our lives."

  "I don't want to, Don." She turned to me.

  "It's not like we have a choice, sweetie. It's the right thing to do." I smiled at her. "Everything will be fine, you'll see."

  I repeated that sentence in her ear so many times before she was taken to the operating room without me, yet she kept on begging me to be there with her.

  Almost three years have passed since the day that left me empty.

  My mother claims that I try to fill the void that's left in me with food. She said it was an easy solution, and that I found a particularly cruel way to punish myself, but she's wrong.

  I knew I had no reason to be punished.

  I didn't do anything that could have contributed to me returning home empty-handed that day.

  I didn’t act recklessly, I didn’t disregard the doctors' advice, I didn’t force my opinion on anyone, and yet, Sarah entered that operating room and never came out of it.

  The baby that she carried, our son, died before the doctors could take it out while I? I sat on a bench in the waiting room, outside the maternity ward, and passed one stage after another on Candy Crush without the possibility of things not working out on their own even passing through my head.

  I never corrected her on it, but my mother is wrong. I don’t eat to punish myself. I eat because that's what I want to do. I eat because as it turns out, we only live once and moreover, sometimes, life is very short.

  About a week after I buried Sarah and our son, I decide
d that I would do what I wanted, how I wanted, and when I wanted to do it.

  In the meantime, besides the fact that I looked like a whale drifted ashore and other than my doctor's claims that I'm on my way to doing irreversible damage to my heart muscle, I'm at ease with the way I choose to live my life.

  I sat for as long as I needed on the front steps of my house, and only after I felt prepared for the peace and quiet that awaited me inside, did I go in.

  I closed the door behind me, sat down in front of the computer, read updates on what was going on in the office, and answered some emails that required my attention.

  I haven't been to the office for two years.

  There were a few occasions when I ventured into the place I helped set up. Occasions like the annual toast, when they would mention Sarah's name and talk of her in the past tense. But these only made me want to go back to my house, so I decided to stay away.

  Sarah was the one who dreamed of creating an app that helps children, parents, and teachers find a common language. She was the one who wanted to express the love of educators in a productive manner. She saw all this in her vision, dreamed the creation of their unique language in detail, and then told me about it.

  I was just the one who turned her words into a business plan, a list of technical needs, marketing tasks, and business opportunities for closing her first few big deals. I'm just the executor, but without her waking up next to me every morning, I couldn't find any interest in that business anymore.

  About a year after Sarah died, I hired the services of a very talented product manager. Along with her, I closed the biggest deal that introduced the app to the U.S. market and some of the first European countries. After that, I was able to walk away from the office, knowing full-hearted that Sarah's dream lived on and continued to do well in the world.

  I got up from the computer about fifteen minutes later, sat down heavily on the couch and ordered myself two family-sized pizza trays with all the toppings, before playing our wedding movie on the DVD.

  "Well... That's why I left the house this morning. That was worth the pain of coming back to it, but Michelle and her eyes didn't show up," I said aloud to no one and smiled as the camera lens zoomed in on Sarah's eyes.