Holding Silvan

by Monica Wesolowska

  Before, I had him to talk about. Now I have nothing.

  For thirty-eight days, every day was April 27th, now every day is June 4th. Summer fog comes in, thick and cold, the night he dies and persists for days.

  Claudia does drop by with flowers. I’d forgotten that. But there it is, in the diary that I have continued to keep. Three calla lilies, five irises still closed like exquisite brushes dipped in purple paint, an explosive pink day lily. A beautiful bouquet. Claudia produces this bouquet for us and then sits at our dining room table complaining. David asks how Brian is and she says, “He’s fine. I guess. I wouldn’t know. He got up this morning. He ate breakfast. No, he meditated. At any rate, he did his usual morning thing and left for work. I wouldn’t know. I’m too tired. We’re too busy,” She says it in a flat, sarcastic voice and it’s hard to tell if the dark humor is her way of relieving ordinary stress or if, in fact, there’s something terribly wrong.

  Now she pulls out a pack of peppermint gum.

  I know what’s coming. Each time she mentions her pregnancy and the nausea that has followed her right to the end, David is surprised as if he’s forgotten what pregnancy looks like. But I never forget. She mentions it now, the burden of a third pregnancy. Her belly stretched beyond capacity. Next, David apologizes for the snotty tissues everywhere – those crumpled signs of grief.

  “Oh, please,” she says, “with two kids at home, our house is snot city.”

  HOSPICE OFFERS FREE weekly counseling for a year after the death of a patient. For a year, we’ll be able to talk about these kinds of interactions if we need to. How we and others could do this grieving thing better if we only had some rules in common. If we lived in Senegal, the whole village would be in mourning; this is what friends from Senegal tell us when it comes out that they, too, lost a child. “Here it is strange,” they say. “Nobody knows.” Hospice also sends us a “spiritual advisor” that first week. She comes and sits in our big armchair with a stack of books and asks questions about what kind of memorial we would like. She has ideas from all traditions, she says; she has poetry, prayers.

  “Well, we have this idea…” we say and describe the sort of thing we did at our wedding, loosely based on the Quaker tradition of witnessing. We’d like our guests to stand in a circle taking turns saying whatever it is that they’d like to say about Silvan. We’d like everyone to sing Silvan’s little song set to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine.” We’ll recite Kaddish. We’d like a Catholic prayer. In a year, we’d like to have a second ceremony, a sort of unveiling, perhaps of a child’s bench that we can keep in the backyard; we will make programs for both events. As we talk, our advisor grows silent. At last, she says, “I think you’ll do fine.”

  MY MOTHER GOES to the photocopy store with Silvan’s photo to make traditional Catholic memorial cards to give out at the memorial and to send to those far away. At the store, his photo creates, in her words, “quite a stir.” Employees gather around to see the beautiful baby. This is him at the peak of his beauty, hazel eyes open, fat pink lips, face bathed in golden sunlight. They all want to know if this is her beautiful grandson.

  “Yes,” is all she can manage.

  “Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” I say.

  “Well…” she says and trails off with her eyebrows raised in perplexity, as if I’d asked her why she hadn’t barked at them, or chirped, or mooed.

  AT THE MORTICIAN’S , there’s a box of tissues in the middle of the table, but no water fountain. At the mortician’s, you can cry but not replenish your tears. I have been dreading it but, of course, the mortician is smooth and good, even gets me to laugh at the spelling of his Polish last name that is so much more complicated than mine.

  This is a family-owned mortuary, one of the last. Because of this, they’re able to tailor their prices. And because of a newborn loss within their own family, they “service” newborns at cost. He tries to sell us nothing, no coffin, no memorial urn, no spot in a crematorium. He simply tells us how much he will charge for cremation, and when we will be able to pick up “the balance of the remains.”

  “The balance?” David asks.

  “Yes,” the mortician says, “the balance of the remains.”

  “But what happens to the rest?”

  “The rest of what?”

  “Of the remains.”

  “You get all the balance of the remains, but I have to warn you that with a newborn it will seem shockingly little.”

  “But why do you keep calling them the balance of the remains?” David persists.

  “Because that’s what they’re called.”

  “All the remains are called the balance of the remains?”

  “Yes,” the man says, refusing to explain that some of the remains may stay in the crematorium, mingled with the remains of others. Instead, he says, “No one should be sitting here in your situation. This is so rare.” This doesn’t seem to help.

  And yet, he is probably right not to explain, not now when Silvan still feels freshly yanked from my arms and too specific to be joined to anybody else’s grief.

  DAVID’S MOTHER ARRIVES in time for the memorial service. She’s anxious again, unsure how to behave now that she’s missed the grueling end. To get his mother to “get” it, David takes her into the office (not yet transformed into a nursery; at least we’re spared that) to look at Silvan’s last photos on the computer. Before David’s even reached the shots where Silvan has lost weight, she’s crying. I hear the sound from the living room.

  “What’s that noise?” Margie asks.

  Margie’s looking at the photo album. Like me, she loves the last photos because she remembers him like that. She likes the photo of his single pimple. Like me, she finds it cute, and proof of almost normal life.

  “That noise?” I say. I go out onto the front porch.

  “I think somebody’s sawing,” I say, coming back in.

  And then I realize it’s coming from the office.

  Construction work. It’s almost like grief. Tearing down to build again.

  Hearing Linda’s tears, I love her once more.

  FOR THE MEMORIAL service, we’ve decided only to invite people who have actually met our son. Already you can predict the future course of friendships from who is there. It is a motley crowd. Our whole immediate family, of course, and our closest friends; but there are a few surprising additions, a few odd absences. Margie and Gavin are there. And Kerry, Silvan’s nurse. And a pregnant friend of a friend whom we barely know but who spent hours holding Silvan at the hospital. Eve is too far away to come back so soon; for this I forgive her. But I’m not so ready to forgive Claudia and Brian. Claudia and Brian seem to think that they can neither bring their children to a memorial nor leave them at home, and I wonder if our friendship will survive it. Michael, in his second year of residency, almost makes the same mistake of being absent. He calls an hour beforehand to tell us that he can’t get time off from his shift without compromising his status. He’s asked his supervisor, a woman he says hates him, for a few hours off and she has been unsympathetic.

  “Michael,” David says, “you are in training to be a doctor who delivers babies, your best friend’s baby has died due to complications of a delivery, you need to be here. This is my son’s funeral.”

  An hour later, Michael arrives, swift and bashful, joining the rest of us in the backyard. Who else is there? It is a blur.

  We stand in a big circle on the cracked concrete beneath a rickety pergola built by the previous owners. There is not enough room in the shade so David and I stand in full sun. More than the details, I am aware of the space we hold between us, these people come to encircle us, the warmth of everyone standing in a circle on that cracked, red concrete.

  We begin with the witnessing. It is sweet. People say what they can, though there’s little to say about a newborn, but that is part of what I’ve wanted to acknowledge. I try to imitate his little cry, the one I imagined meant he wanted me. Other people mention his softn
ess, or their sense of peace as they held him. A close friend of my mother berates the universe for giving our family so much pain, and this is nice, having her express on my behalf an anger I’m not aware of feeling. I tell everyone I am forever grateful that I got what mattered most to me. “Silvan died in my arms,” I say.

  We must have sung; we must have recited prayers – I have a program to prove it.

  And yet my memory of it feels vague. It is a memory of memory becoming vague. I fail to record it in my diary. David tells me later that other people liked it, that his father told him we did a nice job. And I do remember feeling buoyed, completed. To dedicate this time entirely to this little being is incredible. But it is also incredibly little compared to the life he could have lived. To think that all we have left are these tiny stories is painful. To think that never again will so many people remember him so well…

  AFTERWARDS, WE “SIT shiva.” Though we have broken all sorts of Jewish rules by performing an autopsy and cremating Silvan, how glad we are for the ritual of shiva. How else would we carry on? We need time for organized grief. Our shiva is modified from the seven days immediately following burial to a two-day shiva happening on the weekend so more people can come. We don’t know much about sitting shiva, nor do our friends, but one thing I learn is that the bereaved are not required to stand at the arrival of each guest. It is a good rule. I’m too tired to stand. I don’t have it in me to give that much attention to others. Instead, I announce to each person who arrives, “The rules of shiva say I don’t have to stand.”

  Another thing I learn is that you only sit shiva for people older than thirty days. This is interesting considering that a neonatal death is defined as occurring earlier than twenty-eight days. So Silvan is considered more than a newborn both medically and spiritually. I wonder if my grief, and the grief of our family and friends, would have been any different had he died at twenty-eight days instead of thirty-eight. My grief for Silvan feels so particular – no one else in the world can miss him as much as I do – but ritual helps remind me that I’m not the only mother who has grieved.

  All sorts of unexpected people come. A friend from high school. Two former students. I’m most touched by two men from work. They’re both awkward, both thin with big old-fashioned glasses and unruly hair that gets cut at most once a year; they are older than me, poorer, single, childless. But they come all this way to my house to stand in my backyard and hold photos of my dead baby and say appropriate things like, “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  Neighbors come and stand awkwardly at the edge of the shade. We have only lived in this neighborhood five months, but still they stand there and look at Silvan’s photo album, thumbing quickly through the final pages because they are too awful. How odd that I subject them to this. What do I want? Isn’t it enough that they are here?

  One neighbor is wearing a beautiful dress, kaleidoscopic, and I take pleasure in telling her how much I admire it.

  My obstetrician is there.

  My chiropractor’s receptionist with a little potted plant.

  More neighbors arrive with a bottle of wine and sit easily with my mother and pass the time of day with her.

  As shiva goes on, more people we know less well arrive, and more food comes with them. Piles of cakes and cookies. Dozens of doughnuts. Everything sweet. By Sunday night, as people leave, we’re begging them to take sweet things away with them.

  Monday morning comes, and the house feels strangely empty.

  We uncover each mirror. We take a first symbolic walk outside. I feel raw and exposed but glad again for rituals to mark the resumption of life. We circle back to the front porch where we have lit a memorial candle. It’s on the little table where Silvan’s body once lay. The candle is supposed to burn for seven days, but since we have modified our shiva, I think we should blow it out. David says he’ll do whatever I want, but when I try to blow out the candle, my breath is undirected, broken by tears. We leave it burning. We go back into the house.

  We drag through the remaining days of that week and on the seventh day, sometime in the night, I wake again searching the bed for Silvan. At least what I’m saying is, “Where’s Silvan? Where’s Silvan?” but in my semi-sleep I’m searching for Silvan’s babies, a tray of two of them.

  In the morning, we find the candle has gone out.

  Fledglings

  WHEN OTHERS DIED, I HAD A SENSE OF SOULS THAT lingered longer. I felt my father watching with approval from above. I felt Mark arriving in the body of an owl to forgive me for not having noticed the bathroom ceiling. But Silvan was so unformed that within days there seems nothing left. I continue waking in the night, patting down the bed, touching only absence. What baby am I looking for? “Olive?” I say, but Olive is Eve’s baby. “Oscar?” but Oscar is Margie’s. David wakes and reminds me, “Silvan is gone.”

  Yes, he’s gone. With relief, I lie back down. Silvan no longer needs me.

  With relief, I accept that I’m the one left to suffer, not him.

  Around this time, a friend gives me a book of “comforting faiths” – as if faith were a sweater in a catalogue, something to be ordered and tried on for size – and I read how some women like to believe that their babies’ souls have returned to be reborn, sometimes into the same wombs. I’m not comforted at all. I am enraged. If the faith of my youth has dissipated, it is not to be replaced by some other faith. Silvan has had his life. Silvan is gone. And now that Silvan is gone, it is as Dr. Z used to say, we don’t regret a minute that we had with him.

  But in his absence, I’m also unformed, a mother who is childless.

  Unformed, the two of us drift around the house, David and I, like newlyweds, strangely insulated from the world. David’s mother returns home, our families and friends return to the lives they were living before. Because we were grieving for all of Silvan’s life, because we were fed and cared for during all that time, people seem to feel they’ve done enough. I understand. I am ready to be alone again. When my mother calls to ask if I am okay, I say, “I’m fine.” When she doesn’t seem to believe me, I go on, “Losing a grown son to suicide is probably worse than losing a newborn.” I don’t know if you can compare grief this way, but I sense more life ahead than my mother once did, after Mark died and I found her crying at the bottom of the basement stairs.

  Slowly, David and I begin to tidy, to nest, to clear away the patient plastic bags that have lain in a corner of the dining room since the day after Silvan’s birth. At least we don’t have a full nursery to dismantle. At least we don’t find baby accessories objectively attractive. With each item that I remove, glider, bassinet, changing table, the house looks better. It is a reverse sort of nesting. The only toy I keep visible is the white angel bear with the iridescent wings and halo that my obstetrician gave us.

  The bassinet in the corner of our bedroom is replaced with a good luck money tree brought over by a neighbor who scuttles away after delivering it. He also lost a newborn, he tells us, a boy he had decided should be spared a grueling, risky heart surgery. This affords him entry into our house. From the house on the other side, a neighbor emerges to tell us that her twin nephews died as newborns too. In the newspaper, David reads that our zip code has the highest infant mortality rate in the state. This may have nothing to do with the particular damage Silvan sustained, but it connects us somehow, all these islands of grief, all these grieving parents who might understand us.

  On our tidier island, we cook simple meals. We talk to friends on the phone. We continue talking to the social worker about what we expect from our friends and what we feel we are failing to get. Claudia comes over now that the memorial and shiva are over and says we need a new sofa. She thinks our sofa – the sofa of David’s childhood – is more ugly and uncomfortable than grieving parents should have to bear. Her anger about people not getting what they “deserve” repels me. No one deserves anything, I think. The sofa is ugly and uncomfortable. Someday I want to replace it, but certainly not now when I’m wor
king on simply being grateful for what we have left. For one thing, the stack of photos – the extras from the memorial. They sit on the dresser by my open bedroom window. It is an impractical spot, but I must like how the summer wind keeps Silvan present as I go about tidying. He flits around, making a mess in my mind.

  “Here I am,” his picture says from beside my slippers on the closet floor.

  “Here I am,” he says floating down before the mirror.

  THAT FIRST WEEK after he’s gone, I barely leave the bedroom. I lie there with his photo album, I close my eyes and dream about him.

  Next, I leave the house but only for the yard.

  Next, I walk around the neighborhood.

  Little by little, I fly farther and farther from the nest.

  I try dinner at a restaurant with David. That doesn’t go well. Looking at a happy young couple at the next table, I begin to cry. David takes my hand. I cry harder. We must look like we’re breaking up and my sobs come harder, thinking no one can see through my grief to the child who has brought us so close together.

  Next, I go for a haircut. My haircutter has heard the news from Eve whose job it was to call everyone. She says she is surprised how good I look, considering. “It’s because,” I say, “he gave me so much joy.” I have not formulated that thought out loud before and it strikes me as sad; it’s as incommunicable as grief, my joy. I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror and it’s not joy I see but something more complicated peering out from under my wet hair. I see both pride and ugly shame, and shy hope.

  A few days later, I go on a hike with my sister. While we are gone, someone smashes a window and steals everything in my trunk, including my purse. The policeman who takes the report wants me to list everything I’ve lost. Nothing I’ve lost seems to impress him. It was a trunk full of junk, old blankets we kept there in case we needed to sleep at the hospital with Silvan, a breast pumping kit, a coat, a pair of heels. Not even the loss of my purse impresses him, an old ripped cloth bag with an old cellphone in it. In the purse I also had a notebook in which I took some of my notes about Silvan, but this impresses him least of all. Desperate, I say, “And all my photos of my dead son.”