I do.
IT WAS DECIDED that we weren’t in any state to drive home. My mother-in-law, Annette, waited behind to take us in our car while the others went ahead to our apartment. I don’t remember leaving the hospital, but we end up in our car. Annette takes the speed bumps slowly and it makes me wonder if she senses the pain they’ll cause me, each bump startling the body at rest inside of mine.
It’s five thirty when we walk into the apartment. Hank, Aaron’s dad, is standing off to the side near the corner window in our living room. My parents are in the hallway, and my two younger sisters, Alana and Rebecca, are sitting on the couch—they are both university students, and I think of how they should be studying for their finals right now. Hanah, Aaron’s sister and one of my best friends, and her boyfriend, Carson, are on their way. Aaron’s brothers are out of town—Derek on a missions trip in India, Levi at school in Ontario—and we’re told they’re booking flights to come back as soon as possible.
Arriving home feels like tumbling into a twilight zone—like we’re stuck in a past that no longer fits, with the future lingering just out of reach. Everything is exactly as we left it just a few hours earlier, except the dishes have been washed and our living room tidied.
My mother tells me later that they stressed about what to do to prepare for our arrival. Should they put away the baby items? Do our laundry? Hide evidence of my pregnancy? In the end, they knew that they couldn’t just wipe all signs of our child from existence. So they left everything as it was—including the nursery door, slightly ajar. Once they were exhausted from conversation and tears they looked for something to watch on our TV. Unable to figure out how to summon Netflix into view, they rifled through our towering stack of DVDs in search of something happy to distract them. They ended up pulling out the disc Aaron had made of our trip to Disneyland, a year after we’d started dating. Tears poured out of them as they watched us on the screen: happy, naive, carefree teenagers. We rode rollercoasters and laughed as the cart turned this way and that, kissing for the camera on the upward climbs. Would we ever be the same? they wondered out loud, to no one in particular.
In the haze that surrounds the hours after that resident wheeled in the ultrasound, there are pockets of dreamlike clarity. I feel vividly aware of my senses as I sit down on the couch and fold my legs up beneath me. I am mindful not to move, not wanting to feel his lifeless body stir inside of me. The sensation makes me ill, and then incredibly guilty in turn. My belly is still round, but it has changed. I’m not sure what to do, but I can’t let it be real yet. I don’t know where to put my hands. It feels wrong to place them on my stomach, so they fall awkwardly at my sides. Someone hands me a bowl of tomato soup and tells me to eat. As I sit there, slowly and methodically lifting the spoon to my mouth, I hear my mother and Annette in the kitchen around the corner, whispering.
“I think she’s in shock,” Annette says to my mom.
I mull that over. Am I not acting how I’m supposed to? How should you behave while waiting to birth a child who is already dead? While waiting to gaze upon the face of that child for the very first time, knowing that they will soon fade from memory? There is no making sense of the unfathomable, and so I sit. I sit and I eat tomato soup and I watch Friends on the television. I’ll never be able to do any of those things in the same way after.
I don’t actually watch. Instead, I am stuck in my own mind, traveling back to my childhood. I’m in sixth grade at a new school with new teachers, and already they’ve pegged me for the perfectionist I am. We’re at an end-of-school weekend retreat for my year, some hundred of us, and on the last day they give out satirical awards to some of the students. I win the “Failure to Fail” award. They have me come up in front of all my peers to attempt something that simply isn’t doable: shove a box full of crackers in my mouth and then whistle. I am determined to prove them wrong, and as I blow with all my might, a cloud of crumbs bursts out before me. The room erupts in laughter, and I feel my face flush red with embarrassment. I have only failed to do what is obviously impossible, but all I see is that I have failed. It is the first time I can recall feeling so devastated.
I have failed many times since then. Stumbled and crumpled and collapsed in defeat. But as I sit here now I see all of my past failures as trivial compared to this, because this time I failed and a life was lost. Our baby is dead. I keep repeating that over and over and over again in my mind until the words mean nothing to me. How will Aaron ever forgive me? How will I ever forgive myself?
It is an inexplicable feeling to carry death inside you when the very concept of pregnancy is so explicitly connected to life. To be in a room surrounded by family mourning a soul that has departed when the body has not. He is still here. He is with us. And he has to come out. You can’t bury a body in utero, can’t cremate remains that exist in the in-between. Instead, you have to do the impossible. Somehow, it must be done.
3
LESS THAN AN hour after we get home my first contractions start. Hanah has just arrived with Carson, and her confusion over my still-full belly is palpable. Annette called her when Hanah was on a ferry to Vancouver Island. As she heard the news, she slid down the cabin wall and came apart on the floor, gasping for air. Somehow, she is here. She has never been one to hide emotion, and I can see how hard she is trying now. I feel the toll this is taking on her, and for a moment it distracts me from my own pain.
The rushes roll in gently at first—every three minutes, but manageable with a little focused breathing. My body is ready. My mom sits next to me on the couch, careful not to touch me, but her presence is grounding. Friends plays on in the background.
I pick up my phone and open up the contraction timer app I downloaded months ago in preparation. Every time I hit record my mom looks to me and asks, “Another one? So soon?”
By nine PM I can no longer divert my focus with TV and deep breaths. It’s starting. I ask everyone to leave, though the goodbyes are a blur.
Aaron is running a bath behind me, and I am bent over the counter riding out another contraction. We paged the hospital a few minutes ago, asking if I should be in so much pain so soon. Susie, the new midwife on call with our birth program, told us the Cervidil could sometimes cause intense and false contractions. “Take it out,” she suggested. “Just like you would a tampon. Then hop in the bath. The warm water should help you relax.” Before hanging up, she added, “Come back in the morning for another dose, but only once you’ve slept. Really do try to get some rest.”
I climb into the tub to soak as Aaron props himself up on the ledge. We try to talk through what is happening.
“Maybe we’ll be one of those inexplicable medical marvels and he will come out screaming,” Aaron says.
Yes, maybe that’s it. I’ve read the articles that sometimes circulate on Facebook about babies they thought were dead who were placed on their mothers’ chests, then suddenly cried out. I am skeptical, but I don’t want to be. We believe in God—a God that is good. We believe that miracles are possible through Him. What is that belief for, if it can’t help us now?
So we start to pray. We pray that He will save our child, bring him back to life, change what has happened. We believe that He can. And just in case, wanting to cover all of our bases, we pray that the doctors are wrong and that he isn’t dead. Surely, he will be born and he’ll take his first breath and everything will make sense again. I want to hold out hope that our miracle is within reach, that the fact that our baby has died on the same day Jesus was crucified is significant. There’s something to that, isn’t there?
Only that bellowing
