Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  “The earliest we can get you in is nine o’clock tonight.” She left the room to consult with the surgical team. The wall clock read 5:00 PM. The four hours loomed like a chasm.

  “I called your mother,” Bill said.

  “You what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure Bill had ever placed a call individually to my mother. I would not have thought to call her. My mother was all the way in Alexandria, Virginia. I didn’t want to worry her.

  “She’s on her way,” Bill said. I felt confused. I knew we were reeling, but things must be really bad for my mother to jump on a plane. I started to whimper. My skin was damp with sweat, but I felt chilled. I pulled the cotton blanket on the bed up around my shoulders and neck.

  My sister Ellen appeared at the door. Bill had paged her after he had called my mother. She was in the middle of her year as chief resident at Northwestern and had driven from Lake Shore to the South Side as soon as she’d received the page. When people saw us together, they commented that we looked like film negatives of each other: almost identical faces with wavy hair, mine black, hers blond. Her face was splotchy and swollen. She came to the side of the bed and grabbed my arms. She shook with tears. I pressed my face into her hair, which smelled faintly of almond from her shampoo.

  She stayed and watched vigilantly as the doctor who was assigned to our case briefed us on the D&C. He was a middle-aged man with mousy brown hair and a thin, hungry face that reminded me of a greyhound’s.

  “You’ll go under general anesthesia during the procedure and be in recovery for a half-hour or so. We’ll aim to discharge you by 11:00 PM. You can go home and sleep in your own bed tonight.”

  He delivered the detail about our going home to sleep in our bed as if it were a special treat. As if it mattered where we slept tonight. Our children would still be gone.

  I turned my face to the wall. The thin sheets scratched against my legs; the fluorescent lights hurt my eyes. The image of blood and water gushing from my splayed-open legs flashed over and over in my mind. I wished I could go under the anesthesia now.

  By eight thirty, when a surgical team came to prep me for the OR, I was grateful we’d be leaving the hospital that night. The monotony of the room, the blip of the blood pressure machine, the Pepto-Bismol-pink walls—it had all grown unbearable.

  Bill and I said little in the hours leading up to the procedure. When Dr. Eagen stopped in to check on us, he gave us the technical name for what had caused the premature labor: incompetent cervix. This single hospital in Chicago saw a case of IC about every nine days. I opened and closed my mouth soundlessly, like a fish. I had thought what had happened was some kind of freak occurrence. The statistic and its clinical name enraged me.

  “It’s biological,” Dr. Eagen said, as if this would reassure us. “Nothing you could have done to bring it on or prevent it.”

  “And there’s no test for this?” I asked, when I found my voice. I wanted to rip the IV out of my arm and start screaming. We’d had a hundred fucking tests since we became pregnant. We knew our babies didn’t have Down syndrome, or cystic fibrosis, or nine hundred varieties of genetic mutations. We had satellites in space that could take the temperature on Mars, but we couldn’t find a way to check the capabilities of the cervix in a way that would prevent how many deaths a month at hospitals across the country? Around the world?

  “No.”

  I couldn’t accept this reality or bear the looks of compassionate but passive acceptance of the doctors who delivered these facts. I clawed at the sheets on the bed with my fingernails. Dr. Eagen left Bill and me to wait out our time. When we were alone again, I kicked and pounded my feet.

  When the orderly came to redress me in a surgical cap and gown, Bill stroked the side of my face.

  “I’ll see you when you come out. You’re so strong and brave,” he said, his voice breaking. I remembered Sam, the technician from my MRI several years before, saying I was strong, that I looked tough. I wanted to offer Bill some of that courage. I set my hands at my side and lifted my chin. I would be strong.

  I woke in a haze of yellow light, aware of a dull thud of pain in my lower-right abdomen, down under my ovary. The thin-haired doctor was leaning over me, and I heard female voices in the room. “She’s coming around,” he called out. “Sara? Sara? Do you know what year it is?”

  The question seemed ridiculous. I tried to open my eyes wider, to show my lucidity, but stopped; the pain was bad. Much worse as the room came into focus and I became fully conscious of my body. I was able to see the room was mostly dark, just a small desk lamp emitting the low light. Two nurses sat at a console with a computer and coffee mugs on coasters.

  “Who is the current president?”

  How long had I been out? These were questions I imagine were asked of people who had just come out of a coma. I tried to lift my head to look around me. It felt very late. Where was Bill?

  “What year were you born?”

  I answered their questions. The doctor looked relieved.

  “We attempted the D&C but ended up deciding to deliver the twins via C-section,” the doctor with the sallow face informed me.

  I tried to focus on his face. The pain in my lower-right abdomen stabbed. I was finding it difficult to take a full breath of air.

  “You’re fine, though,” he said. “You’ll just have to stay in the hospital for a few days. We’re going to stabilize your pain and then take you to a room upstairs.”

  A heavyset nurse appeared from the blackness. “How’s the pain, on a scale of one to ten?” she asked.

  I didn’t understand why it was so dark in the room.

  “Seven,” I said, trying for equilibrium. “Maybe eight.” She asked me to describe the pain. “Steady,” I said, “and sharp, like the point of a blade.”

  She injected something into an IV tube connected to my arm that was still in place from the surgery.

  The pain did not subside. The nurse tried another medication, and then her shift ended. The next nurse tried a stronger dose. The pain was thudding and constant. I was shaking and freezing cold. I would get warm and then start to sweat. I kept asking for more blankets. After the third medication attempt, I told the nurse the pain had reduced to a four. I wanted to see Bill. I assumed he knew about the C-section, that the doctors were keeping him posted about what was happening.

  Bill was in a hypercaffeinated state upstairs in our assigned room. My mother had arrived around 10:00 PM, along with my brother-in-law. My sister had stayed through the surgery, leaving the room at intervals to see if she could find out any information from the doctors on the floor.

  Bill nearly attacked the orderly who brought me into the room, demanding to know what had taken so long. “I thought I was going to lose you, too.” My mother hung back for a moment and then rushed to me. “Momma,” I said instinctively, reaching out my hands for her the way I must have when I was two. She pulled my head to her chest and put her arms around my back and waist.

  My sister left to go home to salvage whatever sleep she could before she went on call at 8:00 AM. The night nurse tried a new medication, an opiate called Dilaudid that voided all the pain on contact. I wasn’t at an eight or a three or even a one on the pain scale. The pain didn’t exist. I was cogent and centered, but my body felt weightless. I sucked in a big, easy breath. The only other time I’d felt like this was during a meditation on a beach in Greece the summer after Bill and I got married. I had wished many times in the months and years that followed that emotional pain could be so easily medicated.

  At around 5:00 AM, Bill went home to pick up some toiletries and clothes. My mother pushed a chair flush against the bed, so our bodies could be touching. I turned into her side, pressing my face into her sweater. I was barely conscious of the choking, sobbing noises that came from deep within me as she sat beside me.

  The room was constructed in an L shape and faced east. The corridor outside the room was quiet, and I felt that if we stepped outside the room, the hospital would disapp
ear and we’d find ourselves in some kind of infinite purgatorial wasteland.

  A pink streak of light broke through the beveled metal blinds that covered the windows. I folded into the side of the bed and my mother and I cried together—for the babies, for the loss to all of us, a loss that felt fathomless, like the great yawning lochs in Scotland I’d seen when I lived in the UK, whose depths were still unknown.

  The hospital room was a revolving door of nurses, doctors on rounds, interns. I was physically weak and had lost blood. Dr. Baker ordered a blood transfusion. I was terrified, gripped by archaic fears of diseased blood. I asked the nurse, and then my sister, to triple-check the blood type and its history. A symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosis I would receive later, is hypervigilance. Another is flashbacks. When I closed my eyes, I saw the white lights of the operating room, Dr. Eagen’s do-rag, Dr. Baker’s worried face. I was afraid to sleep, fearing if I succumbed completely, I would hemorrhage and die.

  My mother and Bill spent seventy-two hours camped out in the hospital room with me. Their presence gave me enough respite to take short naps, encouraged by antianxiety medication. I resisted the drugs until one of the doctors told me I needed the medication to recover.

  “You need to be able to relax for your body to heal.”

  The day before I was discharged, a counselor named Danielle Perotti, from the perinatal loss department, stopped by our room. She told us that we would have a month to decide what to do with the twins’ bodies and that the hospital would provide us with death certificates.

  I didn’t want to like Danielle. She wore a gray pantsuit with low heels and a silver cross that dangled on a chain at her neck. She was a mother, and, through our discussions, I sensed, a good one.

  She talked to us like capable adults instead of victims. She brought us a large white shopping bag. “Inside the bag is a memento box for each of your twins,” she said. “We made a card with each baby’s footprint just after they were born.” She extended the box toward us so we could see. The box was about a foot square, made of pulpy cardboard that showed the paper’s fibers. It was tied with a dark green satin ribbon. I was surprised that the hospital provided such a service.

  Danielle started to open the box when Dr. May, Dr. Baker’s on-call associate, knocked on the door. Dr. May was a sturdy woman who’d grown up in China and was economical with her words.

  “I need to tell you that in the next day or so your milk is going to come in. To get it to dry up, you can wear a tight sports bra and wrap Ace bandages over the top. The milk can be really hard for some women,” she said. “I suggest you reach out for support if you need it.” Dr. May gestured to Danielle in the chair.

  I waited for further devastation, but the feeling did not come. I felt affirmed that my body would do this reproductively natural thing. I put my hands to my breasts and poked. They were hard like a preripe cantaloupe. I hadn’t even noticed.

  Something about the milk coming in felt hopeful; its existence was an offering to our babies and perhaps even, I allowed myself to think for the span of one breath, a practice run for a next time, when there would be a baby or babies to feed.

  Dr. May had forgotten to shut our door when she left the room. We overheard her instructing the nurses on staff to take us out the back door of the hospital.

  “I don’t want them going out through the lobby, with all the new mothers and babies.” Danielle rushed to close the door, but it was too late. “I’m so sorry you had to—” I shook my head, shame and anger stinging my face. Before we left, Danielle handed me a card and a hospital brochure. “You can come and see me anytime,” she said. I gave her a lifeless hug.

  Bill walked beside the wheelchair I was required to leave in and then pulled our car around the side entrance of the hospital while an orderly waited with me. The lake was the same gray as the sky. The wind was warm, but I shivered as I waited for the car. I held the white bag Danielle had given us, too drained to look through the contents. One of my teachers in England had said that when a death occurs, those who experience the death are forever changed. “Every death is a rebirth for those who remain.”

  I believed in the principle of rebirth. I believed anything could be healed and overcome. But I was afraid of what that rebirth might entail. I did not know what would await us when we got home and tried to resume our lives. And there, standing on the sidewalk already threatening to swallow me like quicksand, I felt the first conscious rip of grief.

  I spent the greater part of the next three weeks roiling on the floor. However I lay, I could not get comfortable. I would find comfort only for several seconds or a minute in a new position, before the nausea found me again and started its exhausting churn.

  My mother flew back to Virginia to regroup with my father. The day she left, Bill’s father and stepmother drove in from Cincinnati and asked what they could do to help. Gail outfitted our house with new sheets and towels and comforting foods they knew we liked. Bill’s mother and stepfather called from Nebraska, where they had recently moved from Manhattan. They, too, wanted to help. People sent cards and flowers that stacked up on the countertops in the kitchen and overflowed, unopened, onto our dining room table and TV console. I told Bill I didn’t want to see anyone and spent my time on our bedroom floor. Danielle left several messages asking us to call the hospital, where the babies’ bodies were being kept, to tell them what we wanted to do. The brochure she had given us listed our options as disposal, burial, or cremation, but I didn’t call her back. Bill told me he could not stand to hear the sounds I was making, and that he was going to his office downtown. I told him to go; I preferred to be alone.

  The day we came home, I moved the picture of Quin Yin, which had remained beside my bed throughout the pregnancy, to the shelf in our Chinese cabinet across from our bed so I could see it easily from my new post on the floor. For ten days I wept beneath the image and beseeched the Great Mother to offer me some comfort and support. I continued to meditate daily but felt no connection, no solace or relief. When I closed my eyes at night, violent images flashed through my mind: rivers of blood and dead babies. I’d twist in bed as great paintbrush strokes of fear rushed up and down my body, until I finally took the antianxiety drug Dr. Baker had prescribed. Only then did I succumb to sleep.

  On the eleventh day, the house was quiet. Bill’s parents had left and Bill was at work. I kneeled before the picture of Quin Yin. “I’m not asking you to bring our babies back,” I cried. “But I thought you were real. I trusted you. I need help. I am in agony.”

  The house remained quiet. I heard several birds squawking outside the window. I felt too tired to cry. My heart began to flutter in my chest as if it had broken out of my ribcage and had been pushed up high against the skin.

  My rational self reminded me that people had suffered worse losses. I understood this intellectually, but I could not get off the floor. I felt as if I were being burned slowly with an invisible fire. “Please,” I said to the air, “help me.”

  The light in the room expanded, and I felt a breath of air brush my face. I turned onto my stomach and pushed myself up into a squat, then rolled onto my knees so I was sitting with my legs folded under me. The Chinese cabinet started to wave like a mirage in the desert. I had the ridiculous idea that the Great Mother was standing in the room.

  Two things.

  I heard the words not as an audible sound, but in my mind, the way I’d heard the voice say, Open your heart to your family, in my meditation several years before.

  First: Some babies die. Dog babies, dolphin babies, human babies. This is not personal.

  I held still. My heart continued to flutter. I pressed my hand against it, asking that it be still so I could hear.

  Second: You have been initiated.

  The light in the ceiling lamp swelled and then dimmed. The wavy energy I’d felt was gone. The afternoon sun spilled onto the carpet. It was 3:15 PM.

  I did not write the experience off as a figment o
f my imagination. Raised bumps covered my arms; the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I accepted the possibility of the visitation as real, at least as real as the voices in meditation, perhaps only because I had not heard some pat answer, the words I wanted to hear: Your babies are coming. You will have children.

  A spiritual teacher my father had introduced me to said in a lecture once, “Paradox is at the heart of spiritual truth.” I spent several hours contemplating the paradoxical message. Some babies die: not personal. You’ve been initiated: deeply personal. The meaning was trying to make itself clear in my mind. With the twins’ death, I had not been rejected from being a mother; I had been initiated into motherhood.

  I still felt upset and alone and afraid. But I took the first full breath I’d taken since I’d come home from the hospital. That night, I joined Bill at our dining room table for dinner. The next morning, I took a shower. Over breakfast, Bill and I made some decisions about what we would do next.

  Bill supported me in taking a three-month sabbatical from my coaching practice. I would accept an offer to teach the graduating class of the counseling program where I’d done my training, which would take place one night a week for three hours. With work accounted for, I took out the bag Danielle had given us at the hospital, the one with the twins’ boxes. The corners were bent a bit, but the boxes had traveled well. I set them side by side on the table.

  “I don’t want to be having this conversation,” Bill said, his eyes squinted and tense. “And I don’t want to have a funeral.”

  “I don’t want to just leave the bodies with the hospital,” I said, starting to cry.

  My meeting with the funeral director who handled cremations was my first venture out of the house. Part of the reason I stayed inside so long was that I felt demoralized by most things people had to say about the twins and what had happened. I bristled at any allusion to this being “God’s plan” or notion that this was an experience that would provide life lessons and growth. Nor could I embrace the opposite and also popular offering that this never should have happened, that it was a tragedy that went against nature.