Holding Silvan

by Monica Wesolowska

  Then, as lunch ends, Silvan gives his little, creaky door cry, not much, but with a baby who asks for so little, we jump for his slightest wish.

  I pick him up and hold him in the kitchen while David does the dishes. Then we go into the living room. I sit, still holding Silvan. Gavin has just told us he’s been feeling down for months, that this is why we haven’t seen more of him. He’s struggling as a stay-at-home dad. Then he apologizes for having a complaint so petty in comparison to ours and I love him for it. Still, I start to have that feeling that I need to be alone with Silvan. I think perhaps I’ll excuse myself to give him a bath. This, I’m sure, will be the last bath. I am eager for one last bath. I need to see his body in all its naked glory. But first, it is time for his scheduled medication – he is so calm, it hardly seems necessary, but I don’t want him slipping into pain. I sit him up.

  David gives him his doses. I wait for Silvan to swallow, then lower him to the crook of my arm. But something gurgles, like he is snoring with every exhalation.

  “What’s that noise?” I ask.

  “Oh, no,” David says, “He’s got medication in the back of his throat.”

  He takes Silvan from me. He holds him face downward but nothing comes out and the snores still come.

  “Do you think it’s the death rattle?”

  David shakes his head. He’s sure it’s the medication. He takes Silvan and rotates him side to side. Then he gently turns him upside down. For a moment, that’s okay with Silvan. Then, as the skin of his face puckers around his chin and grows pink, he reacts, gives his squawk.

  “Give him back,” I say.

  David gives him back.

  I soothe Silvan with a mock criticism of the beating he’s taken at the hands of his father, but David seems to have fixed the problem. The rattle is gone. Silvan has resumed his slow, calm breathing.

  We continue our conversation and then, a pleasant ten or fifteen minutes later, while Gavin is talking, or David is talking, or somewhere in between, there is no breath. How do I feel no breath? And how long ago was breath? The bundle of Silvan feels different. Heavier, more still. I watch his nostrils. I will not alarm David unnecessarily. I watch. No breath comes. No breath comes. The men continue talking about something I cannot hear. I put my fingers to his neck. I’ve never felt for his pulse this way before. I feel no pulse. But I’ve never felt for it before. Maybe I just don’t know how. So I watch his nostrils again. Still no breath. I put my fingers to his neck. Still no pulse. Then David notices something different in me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “I can’t feel a pulse.”

  Gavin grabs his jacket, I think I nod at him as he slides from our house.

  David goes for the stethoscope. He listens to Silvan’s chest.

  “Is there a heartbeat?” I ask.

  “I don’t think there is one,” he says.

  So we sit there. David doesn’t know either, I think. After a while, I say, “So do you think he’s still alive?”

  “No. There’s no heartbeat,” he says.

  “Oh my god. I was sitting here thinking you didn’t know, because you said you didn’t think there was a heartbeat.”

  “I’m sorry, I think he’s dead, ” David says. “I mean, he is dead.”

  I SIT WITH my son. He is warm and still and calm.

  Both my sister and David’s sister are expected for visits shortly so I ask David to call them and tell them not to come.

  He isn’t ready yet to say Silvan is dead and so he says, “Hold off on coming. Silvan’s having a hard time.” Then I realize that my sister may go out for the evening instead of coming here and that my mother will be alone when we call back. So I have David call with the truth. And he calls his sister back too but his sister has already left work so he has to leave a message on her home phone, then he calls his dad with the news, and his mom who keeps asking questions even though he says he has to go, then the hospice worker. The disparity is tremendous: mother sitting calmly with her child while father does, does, does. But, after the frenzy of the phone calls, it is David’s turn to sit with his son, while I get up to stretch my arms.

  I go to the bathroom, although I don’t really need to pee, but somehow going pee seems away to keep going, to acknowledge that I’m still here after all.

  The hospice nurse will arrive in an hour to “pronounce” Silvan, meaning to pronounce him dead, a bureaucratic necessity to guard against burying people alive, I guess. If hospice doesn’t do it, we’ll have to call 911.

  That means for one hour more he is not quite dead.

  I take him back from David. The bundle is still warm and I can feel still like a mother with her babe in arms. But he is getting heavier.

  The hospice nurse told us from the beginning that one of the things she could do for us at the end is help bathe him. But I’d hoped to do it on my own.

  Now David asks if he can help.

  We fill the bath, as usual, in the sink. As always, we test the water, making it nice and warm. We set up the soft changing table on the counter, get two clean towels, including one with a hood so his head won’t get cold as we’re drying him. Then I carry him into the kitchen and put him on the changing table. Undressing him is fine until I get to the diaper and there, after days of no pee, after a month of no poop, is a yellow stain and a tarry plug. I freak.

  I say, “I can’t do this.” I am thinking of the rest of my dead.

  But there is David, he keeps us going. He disposes of the diaper and lifts Silvan’s body – now strangely heavy – into the water where his limbs loosen and float.

  The sun comes slanting into the kitchen, lighting up the yellow table and walls. I start with his head, just as you are supposed to do with babies, lifting the clean cloth to his eyes. As the water runs into his eyes, the lube and dust coating them melt away and we see them – that green and blue and brown fringed with lustrous lashes. We wash his lips, so full once, now like exquisite etchings, and behind his downy ears; we wash the hair on his head which, in the bright kitchen, shows itself to have hints of red in its brown. We wash his bony chest, the tiny hollows of his armpits, those delicate fingers. We run the washcloth down the laddered bones of his back, and over his still-soft buttocks and down his long legs to his feet, those tender soles.

  Once we have dried him thoroughly, I go for the receiving blanket. None of this has been consciously planned, because I knew I could not predict how I would feel at this moment, but as I go through the motions, I have a sense of having already rehearsed.

  He lies on his changing table with his limbs fully extended, something he never did in life. With the calmness of someone who lives both inside and outside of herself, I have David take a picture of Silvan’s skeletal corpse in case we want to show people in the future what a death like this looks like. As if the horror of this picture could possibly convey the depths of what the three of us have gone through.

  Then, because Silvan in life liked to be curled up, I bend his knees towards his chest and lower his elbows towards his knees, afraid if I don’t do it now, he will become stiff in his vulnerable, unnatural pose.

  David insists on swabbing the interior of Silvan’s mouth one last time while I hover, exhorting him not to spend too long at it, not wanting Silvan’s mouth to stay open forever.

  Then I swaddle him more carefully than I ever have. The receiving blanket is particularly nice, a thick white cotton with green stitching around the borders. David teases me for whatever it is that makes women treat fabric designed for babies almost as tenderly as they treat babies themselves.

  But there is no denying that Silvan, carefully bundled in bright white, is angelic.

  “Should we close his eyes?” David asks then.

  “No,” I say, “I’m used to them open by now.”

  FOR SOME REASON, we decide to take him into the backyard, as if this too is tradition, or part of our plan.

  There, in the sunlight, he is even more magnificent, the color of
his eyes and hair breathtaking against the luminescent white of his skin. Again, we take pictures and it no longer feels like cold reportage, but something familiar, something people used to do routinely, recording their loved ones after death, proof that they have gone.

  But time is passing. The hospice nurse will be here by six o’clock.

  We bring him inside where I lay him again on his little bed still on the dining room table where, just a short while before, he had lain beside me during lunch.

  It’s time for tea.

  A FEW MINUTES later, cup of tea in hand, I stand looking down at my peaceful son, and it seems suddenly a shame not to offer this vision to others.

  My sister answers the phone. I can feel my mother suffering in the background and I ask for her immediately. “Oh, yes, yes,” she says to my offer to come and see Silvan and, “Can your sister come too?”

  “Yes, but hurry, hurry,” I say because they must see him before the hospice nurse arrives, while he is still in that in-between place, while his soul still seems to hover nearby. For that is the sense I have. That his soul is there making me … elated, almost. As if his death like this, in my arms, in the middle of the afternoon, is his gift to me.

  My mother and Katya arrive, Katya with the little something she’d promised to bring him today: a new hat. It is just the sort of hat I’d looked for on my hat hunt earlier, a stocking cap with blue and white stripes. She asks if she could at least put it on. It’s enormous on him. We laugh at how silly he looks. Then I take it off because I’m not letting Silvan leave us with the indignity of clothes too big for him. His hair has been tousled by the hat and Katya tries to smooth it, running her hands against the grain.

  When she is done, I smooth it my way. We laugh again.

  In all of this, my mother remains somber.

  Katya grasps one of his knees.

  EVERYONE BUT US is gone now. It is six o’clock and the hospice nurse arrives. She’s her usual self and she speaks to Silvan in her usual way. She opens his swaddling blanket saying, “I’m just going to take a little listen here; there you go, the stethoscope is a little cold.” Then she says to us, “Listen to me, I still talk to him like he’s alive,” which makes sense to us. And then she says to him, “Okay, all done, I’m going to wrap you up now.”

  She sits down to fill out a form which, I presume, will pronounce him dead, although it does cross my mind, the way she continues talking to him, that there might be a faint heartbeat, that it’s a good thing we treated him so tenderly in his bath, always keeping his head above water, his neck supported, his bony backside from weighing too heavily on the roughness at the bottom of the tub.

  She goes with David into the kitchen so he can witness her disposing of our extra narcotics, and he makes jokes about how he should have filled the bottles with replacement liquid and spirited the morphine away for himself. Life is going on, people going about their business, with Silvan lying here. The magic is dissipating. It’s time to call the mortuary, but David’s dad hasn’t arrived yet and his sister hasn’t decided what to do, and my brother is unreachable. I’m the one plying the phones now, postponing calling the mortuary, postponing the time when his body, which still gives me joy to see, will be truly gone.

  But then, when David’s Dad arrives – he’s made it across the bridge in record time, a blessing – I see the truth.

  Silvan’s pupils are still magnificent – “Isn’t he beautiful?” I say to my father-in-law, and, “Doesn’t he look peaceful?” – but the whites are changing, turning the darkening color between yolk and white in an old hard-boiled egg.

  “ARE YOU READY for me to be here?” the undertaker asks when he arrives at eight o’clock.

  I’ve spent the last half an hour after hospice left simply sitting and admiring Silvan’s face, to memorize each detail, to suck it through my eyes until it’s so imprinted on my brain that I’m guaranteed the ability to recall it at will from now until eternity.

  David says yes and lets him in where he asks me the same question.

  I assume there will be paperwork to do, information to convey, but here it is: he has come for my baby. The undertaker is an obese man missing one arm from the elbow down. Held in the armpit of that truncated arm is a large square of folded plastic. My eyes keep wandering to the plastic and I feel bad, not wanting him to think it’s his arm I’m looking at, not wanting him to know that in my grief, it seems too cruel for a perfect baby to die while a marred human being like him goes on. Finally, I ask him about the plastic under his arm. “Is that for carrying him out?”

  “Yes, he will go out of here entirely covered,” he says.

  Having been warned by hospice about this, we have come up with a plan to avoid seeing Silvan carried away from us covered. I tell the undertaker my plan and he agrees readily and removes himself to the sidewalk by his van.

  When we’re alone again, I unwrap Silvan one last time and kiss his skinny chest between protruding nipples and then the sole of each foot. David does the same. Then, carefully, carefully, I wrap him again in his receiving blanket, now a departure blanket, the rest of him as perfectly naked as the day he was born.

  We go to the front door and David opens it and I carry Silvan out onto the porch and carefully place him on the marble-topped table beneath the potted fig tree. The undertaker has left his square of folded plastic there. The temperature on the porch is pleasant, there seems something symbolic about the fig tree.

  David says goodbye first. I insist. It feels impossible for me not to have the last goodbye.

  But here it is. This is it.

  As I lean over Silvan, I notice the giant trees in the yard two doors down, the giant trees full of birds that have awakened me each morning since Silvan’s birth with their joyous, springtime greeting of the dawn. Those trees have caught in their upper limbs the last of the sunlight; from a crack beneath encroaching fog, long arms of gold weave through the green. The beauty gives me – for lack of any better word – hope. I lean close to Silvan and his open eyes. I kiss his forehead, his nose, his lips.

  “Goodbye, Little Monkey,” I say.

  But that isn’t right. How can that be the last thing I say to him? He isn’t a monkey at all. He is a baby boy. My baby boy. My Silvan. What is the last thing he needs to hear from me before he goes out on his own? How is he to know, young as he is, who he is and by whom he is loved?

  But I have to be fast about this. The undertaker is down there by his van. I’ve seen him through the window, pacing, and although he has told us to take all the time we want, he can’t mean forever, can he? And besides, what if a neighbor sees me with my baby and comes to visit now? Or what if a passing stranger sees me and is horrified? The street is empty, darkening, everyone but us chased away.

  “I love you, Silvan,” I say and then, before I can ruin it with anything else and have to start again, I turn swiftly, carrying David swiftly with me, swiftly crossing the threshold back into our house, letting the screen door bang, leaving Silvan’s body out there in the glorious evening air – the hardest thing I’ve ever done – because it is his body now, and no longer part of mine.

  I BOLT UPRIGHT in the middle of the night. Something is missing. I search in the dark for something on the bed, something on the chair with my books, over there by the bassinet piled high with blankets.

  “What’s wrong?” David asks.

  Then I realize what’s missing. “Where is Silvan?”

  “Silvan’s gone.” David says.

  He thinks I’ve gone nuts, but he says nothing. We go back to sleep.

  Minutes later, David wakes looking for Silvan. Then he, too, remembers.

  HIS LITTLE UNDERSHIRT retains his smell. Once a day, I allow myself to dig it out of the laundry basket and inhale deeply.

  On the third day, it loses his smell. Suddenly, his under-shirt is simply a small piece of dirty laundry. I throw it back. I cry and tell David I’m not ready yet. David takes the undershirt back out of the basket, then Silvan’s
little terrycloth pajamas; he sniffs until he finds a scented corner.

  “Don’t sniff too much or you’ll lose the scent,” he warns. “And keep it out of the rest of our laundry.”

  I AM LYING in bed bereft, unable to move. At a loss, David goes into the other room and gets the photo album I’ve put together. I put it together fast, fearing that the farther I get from his death, the more difficult it will become to sift through these photos, that they will no longer seem to breathe, that they will flatten. David thinks it’s strange, the way I keep looking at Silvan’s photos; but he thought it was strange how much I stared at Silvan in the flesh too. He brings in the photo album and tosses it on the bed.

  With nothing else to do, I pick it up.

  Within minutes, I’m smiling again. I feel it on my face, a smile of wonderment. I examine Silvan’s face in the photos with the same serious attention that I examined him in the flesh. I look at each photo and try to feel as I did when the photo was taken. It’s hard to believe he was always a hundred times more magnificent to me in the flesh than in his photos.

  How did I manage, while he was alive, not to burst with joy?

  Full Circles

  FOR THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS THE PHONE RANG OFF THE hook, the world revolved around us, and nothing else happened but Silvan; but from the first morning after him, it is silent here. When someone does call, there’s little to say.