Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  I believed the Great Mother’s message—that sometimes babies die. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t feel we were entitled to children, or that we deserved them because we were nice people or because we’d make good parents. I didn’t believe it should or shouldn’t have happened. My favorite card was from a friend, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. In telegram style on a thick white piece of Crane stationary, he wrote: “Just heard what happened. Completely sucks. I love you.”

  On my way to the funeral parlor, my phone rang. I answered, thinking it could be the director I’d spoken with the day before. A female voice with a rolling Southern accent announced that she was calling from my insurance company. She said she’d left several messages, as they needed to register me for labor and delivery at the hospital.

  I felt unnerved being out of the house. The sunlight hurt my eyes and was bringing on a headache. My thoughts were scattered and disjointed. Bill found the idea of the funeral home unbearable, so I had volunteered to go on my own. As excruciating as it felt to schedule the meeting, I felt as if I were taking some small action as a mother. I was taking care of our babies in some way. I started the drive feeling, if not good, strong and more energized. The insurance call came as a slap.

  I informed the woman that we were no longer pregnant, that the twins had died. The woman paused for a moment and then said. “Oh, well. God knows what he is doing. It obviously wasn’t meant to be.” She said this casually, as if I were on the phone with J.Crew and she was informing me that a sweater I wanted was sold out.

  “I’ll just go ahead and take you off the list,” she said.

  “You do that!” I said, throwing the phone to the floor of the car. If it wouldn’t have hurt me or anyone else, I would have driven my car into a tree.

  I found other people’s attempts to reconcile what had happened challenging, too. A few people in the holistic community who believed we are 100 percent responsible for anything that happens in life suggested that perhaps Bill’s and my marriage wasn’t strong and that was why the babies hadn’t stayed, or that the twins’ death was a good thing in the sense that now I would be able to really help people because I’d suffered a loss. I fantasized about smashing plates.

  On a Friday in early October, Bill and I drove to Joliet, which Bill dubbed “the anus of Illinois,” for the twins’ cremation. We’d met previously with the funeral home to pick out two small urns, one with dolphins and the other with flying seagulls. We’d been told that we could bring any special items, such as toys or clothing, to be cremated with the twins. I’d gathered some flowers from our garden, some incense I’d bought in Glastonbury, and one little outfit for each baby that someone had given us as an early shower gift. I bundled them all in my favorite pashmina, made out of soft teal wool.

  Bill drove eighty miles per hour down the highway. His face looked wan. I felt sick, too, driving to this industrial site, holding in my hands items that would be burned with our babies’ bodies. But I felt compelled to attend the cremation. I wanted our babies to know we were there for them at every moment.

  The road leading to the cremation site looked postapocalyptic. Massive construction on something had begun and then been abandoned. The choppy drive took us through loose rock and asphalt piles, uninhabited construction trucks and cement mixers. I checked the directions multiple times to ensure we were on the correct street. We pulled up at a building—the building—a one-story cinder-block box about twenty-five by twenty feet. The worst part was the sound—a great roaring churn that echoed far out into the woods behind the site.

  “It’s just a giant incinerator,” Bill hissed, as I opened the door and double-checked that the twins’ things were contained in the wrap.

  Bill scraped his feet in the gravel at the side of the car, looking like a spooked horse. “I’ll go in and check it out,” I said. The whirring noise was louder inside, and I had to shout when giving my name to a short woman sitting at the front desk. She wore what I would call a church dress, red with a pattern of white flowers and a lace collar; her gold name badge read DOREEN.

  Doreen confirmed that the twins’ bodies had arrived from the hospital and walked me through to the family viewing room. Someone had tried to make it lovely, but the room looked like a blown-up dollhouse with inexpensive, chintzy furniture and doilies against pale yellow walls. Cut into one wall was a window that had a view into the incinerator room. Bill could not come in here.

  “I think I’ll wait outside with my husband, if that’s okay,” I said. I held out the bundle that was still in my arms. “I brought some things for the boys,” I said. My voice came out cracked and hoarse. Doreen assured me whatever we wanted to do was fine. She said the cremation would begin in fifteen minutes and take about an hour.

  “It takes less time for babies,” she said, giving me a sympathetic look.

  I handed her the keepsakes we’d brought, and she walked me to a tray in the wall between her office and the incinerator room. I placed the items inside. The tray was made of shiny steel and felt cold to my hand. Doreen assured me these things would be cremated with the twins. I double-checked that I’d given her everything we’d brought, and then I ran out of the building to the car.

  Bill had spotted a park on the other side of the construction. “Let’s go there,” he said. “I think we’ll be able to see the place but not hear it.”

  The park was a state-run forest preserve. Ours was the only car in the lot, and from what we could see, we had the park to ourselves. We’d dressed up for the occasion: Bill in a white button-down shirt and suit pants, I in a blue dress, a shade darker than the wrap I’d brought for the babies. We looked for an easy trail on the map, one we could manage in our attire, and hiked for a few minutes into the woods. We walked in until we could see the small cement building through the trees. At nine forty-five, the time the cremation was set to begin, we grabbed on to each other and I said a prayer for our boys. Bill kept track of the hour on his watch. Our prayer took only a few minutes, and then we stood in the circle of trees, uncertain of what to do. Bill suggested we list the reasons we were grateful for the twins: “that we got to experience over five months of pregnancy”; “that they allowed us to be parents for the first time”; “that they proved our bodies could do this, that our eggs and sperm liked each other”; “that we could get pregnant and have children.”

  We listed things until we were sobbing, holding on to each other in a viselike embrace. As I clung to Bill’s chest, I felt wrenching sadness and also a sensation of release. I felt that we might be leaving a chunk of the sadness in the woods that day, and that the woods were happy to take it. When the hour was over, we walked to the car. Bill had sweated through his shirt. His sleeves were smeared with mascara and salt from my tears.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t go in there,” Bill said, gesturing over the trees toward the crematorium.

  “It was just their bodies in there, anyway,” I said. “Their spirits had already left.” Bill said he wasn’t sure what he believed about that.

  “You think it’s okay, though, with them, that we didn’t wait in the building?” Bill said. He put the key in the ignition to start the car.

  “It think the park was much better, actually,” I said.

  Bill looked concerned as he pulled onto the highway.

  We decided we’d go to lunch, even though it was early, somewhere new that didn’t remind us of anything. Lunch out would be better than the emptiness of our house. Our home had never felt so before, but on some days now it seemed cavernous. Bill drove more slowly than he had on the way out that morning. We listened to classical music on the radio and held hands over the gearshift. I felt close to him, and tired in a good way.

  When we arrived at the restaurant, Bill called me to the back of the car. He had been crossing to meet me on the passenger side, when something had stopped him. I ran around the side and looked where his fingers were pointing. In the beige rim of the roof was a large Y-shaped tree branch.

  “It wa
sn’t there this morning,” Bill said. “I’m sure of it. I got gas and had the car washed before we left.”

  I had not seen the branch on the car at the crematorium, either.

  “Do you think?” Bill trailed off, unable perhaps to give voice to what he was thinking. I kept quiet. I typically would have been the one to suggest some kind of metaphysical possibility.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think the boys put it there,” Bill said. He stood straight, his chest slightly puffed out, as if to defy anyone who would challenge him. “I think they put it there to say they were with us and it was okay that we witnessed their cremation in the woods.”

  We took the branch into the restaurant with us, and later, when we went home, I held it in my lap for a long time, feeling the smooth bark and small woody knots. We placed the branch in the solarium alcove on a small table where we’d place the twins’ urns when I picked them up the next week: facing west, the place of our ancestors, overlooking the garden.

  After the twins were cremated, a single mission moved me out of bed each day: Get well so we can have a family. Condolence cards liked to say, “Time heals all wounds” but I had experienced, with previous traumas, that some rigorous inner work was also necessary. At my follow-up appointment, Dr. Baker told me I was showing signs of PTSD.

  I sought out a therapist named Eleanor, a specialist in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a therapy being used with Iraq War veterans and 9/11 firefighters, as well as lay trauma survivors. Eleanor told me we would have to start with any unhealed trauma from my past that was reminiscent of the twins’ death.

  “Have you experienced any previous sexual or reproductive trauma?” she asked.

  “Yes, Eleanor, I have.”

  I left feeling angry. I decided to walk the long way to my car, through Millennium Park, where I could see the lake. The water was gray-blue, like the sky, and seagulls were chasing and calling to each other.

  Eleanor’s office was not the first place I had heard that traumas were connected, and I felt angry at the potential relationship. If the childhood traumas somehow led to my reproductive issues, I felt kicked while down—punished for having been hurt.

  I walked all the way to the lake. At the place in the path where the water came up to a cement embankment with a swimming beach, I stopped and picked up two gray stones from the grass and threw them, one at a time, into the water. There was a headwind, and the stones did not fly far. They plopped almost in tandem into the waves and sank to the bottom. When I thought about the traumas’ being linked together in a thematic chain, I felt broken. But if this work helped me heal, and helped Bill and me have a child, I would do what Eleanor recommended.

  Grieving as a couple presented challenges. If Bill was having a good day, he would scowl if he found me crying at the bathroom sink. If I experienced him as angry, I’d feel hurt and want to retract. We committed and recommitted to staying open and present with each other, but doing so was not easy.

  One day he came home from a meeting with a new client feeling lighter, happy to have felt “normal” that day, he said. I had not felt well; a wave of breathless pain had hit somewhere around four o’clock that afternoon, and I’d lain in a heap in the bathroom with our dog for several hours. Bill saw my splotchy skin and my red-rimmed eyes, and did an about-face toward the door. “I feel like you want to leave and never come back,” I yelled at him.

  “I do want to leave and never come back,” Bill said, standing in the open frame of the door, a Halloween sky of translucent clouds and the sliver of the moon behind him.

  The moment felt charged, the way the air does before a storm. We locked eyes, mirrors of pain and sadness. After a moment, Bill closed the door and came inside the house. We ate dinner together and afterward held hands. I went to the bathroom to wash my face.

  “It gives me great faith that you two can be so honest,” Eleanor said when I told her about the interaction.

  I’d feel as if I was getting better, and then I’d wake up feeling flattened. As I continued EMDR, I felt a regular urge to scream. I feared if I gave voice to the sound I felt inside my body, the neighbors would be terrified and call the police, so I got into my car and drove to the expressway, onto I-94 heading north. I went back and forth between North Avenue and Lawrence, waiting until I was staggered between semitrucks and smaller sedans in which the drivers wouldn’t be at eye level. I picked my moment and began to shriek. My throat was scratched raw in seconds. My chest protested the intensity of the sound. My hands shook on the wheel. I tried to keep my eyes clear of tears so I would not hit anyone on the road. The car became a new vehicle for grief.

  As soon as Dr. Baker cleared me for exercise, I went to yoga. My mantra as I prostrated myself on my mat was full healing, to get well so I could try and be a mother again.

  “We must really want this,” Bill remarked to me after yet another friend tentatively asked us if we thought we would continue to try to get pregnant.

  Instead of lessening our desire, the loss had intensified it, and continued to; the depth of the pain acted as some kind of bellows that increased the fire of our longing.

  I sought out a new yoga studio, where I didn’t know anyone who would ask me about the pregnancy. I found a teacher I liked. One day I arrived to find the class had been changed to a prenatal workshop. Several chatty women in various stages of pregnancy greeted each other and began setting up props by their mats.

  I looked around at the lululemon-clad mommies-to-be, in their cheerful blue and cranberry tops stretched wide over baby bumps, and fully believed that all of these women had effortlessly conceived and would have these children. Everyone else had children whenever they wanted, easily. Even though one in six U.S. births is helped by some kind of fertility treatment, and somewhere around 136,000 adoptions take place every year in the United States, I felt I was the only one who had struggled, who would not carry a baby to term, who wouldn’t get the joy of raising a child. The hurt inside me felt so great I thought I might implode.

  “You’re welcome to stay.” I turned to find the instructor, a wide-hipped woman with hazel eyes, pointing to an available place on the floor. “I can adapt the class for a mixed group.” I could imagine no scenario in which I would choose to stay for a prenatal yoga class. But the day had turned blustery and overcast, and I felt too tired to walk to the car. “Fine,” I said, huffing toward my mat. “I’ll stay.”

  I’d taken to running away from the phone when it rang.

  “It’s someone else calling to tell me they’re pregnant,” I’d say to Bill if he brought the phone to me, pushing it away from my body with my hands.

  “Not everyone is pregnant right now,” Bill said.

  It felt like they were. In the same week, Kaitlin, Amanda, and my childhood friend Heather had all called to inform me they’d entered their second trimester. I felt simultaneously happy and emotionally impaled. A part of me wished that I could hide until I felt better or we had a baby of our own.

  It seemed that anytime I arrived at the gym, mothers and pregnant women were working out en masse. I would pick the line in the grocery store where a woman with a baby or small children were practicing words.

  “Are you jealous or envious?” Eleanor asked me in a session. “Jealousy is not wanting them to have what they have. Envy is wanting it, too.”

  “Both,” I said, hating myself for the ugliness of it. “Jealous of strangers, envious of friends,” I confessed.

  In October, I flew to D.C. to my parents’ house for the wedding of a friend of the family. My mother had retired in September, and we spent Friday having lunch and shopping in Georgetown. It had been only a few weeks since her retirement, but she’d changed. She seemed more vibrant. She arrived at the airport to pick me up wearing a green sweater and dark jeans that flattered her shape.

  “I’ve been going to the gym five days a week,” she said. “Dad and I are taking a cooking class at the Smithsonian.” Preretire
ment, she had worked sixty to seventy hours a week, ingesting Diet Coke and bags of pretzels at her desk, wearing navy blue or black suits or boxy Jones of New York separates.

  “I’m calling her my trophy wife,” my dad said. In a gesture I’d never seen before, he twirled my mother around the living room, holding one of her arms in the air and putting his other on the small of her back. My parents had always been affectionate, but my father had never seemed interested in appearances. His interests were his spiritual pursuits and sports, basketball and tennis.

  “Retirement is working for you guys,” I said, laughing.

  “I don’t know why I’m able to get healthy now. I’ve made plenty of attempts in the past,” my mother said.

  I felt joy seeing her be able to devote time to herself. It was something my sisters and I had always wanted for her.

  “You look great, Mom,” I said.

  The night of the wedding, I felt broken again from a day spent seeing people’s babies and explaining to extended family friends that no, I was not pregnant anymore.

  By January, with the turn of the New Year, I felt physically stronger and was enthusiastic to make it to May, when we could do IVF again. I had begun to believe we could have a baby again, and I would act accordingly. The success rates for pregnancies with a cerclage were still 60 and 80 percent. Gambling had never appealed to me, and it occurred to me that if I carried the baby, we would be doing exactly that with our child’s life. But even still, Bill and I were on board to try again.

  On January 14, I took a shower before bed and turned up the water extra hot, languishing in the heat and steam. I bent to fill a washcloth with a shower gel and noticed my nipples were erect, and that despite the heat they were sore. A stream of white jettisoned out from my right breast. I put my hands to the nipple, concerned I had some kind of infection. The liquid was creamy and opaque. I raised my hand to just under my eye, where I could examine the liquid in the light. I stared for a moment, trying to remain objective. It was breast milk.