our beautiful son is born, still.
IN THE IMMEDIATE moments after his birth, we pore over every flawless inch of his strong body. He is the perfect mixture of us both. I see Aaron’s nose, head shape, and long fingers and toes—he would have been tall. But he has my eyes, dimpled chin, and shock of black hair. I don’t believe it’s bias when I think that he’s a striking baby. These moments are both the happiest and the most painful I’ve ever known. There will never be enough of them.
Then Susie says the words we never thought we’d hear:
“We know what happened.”
“You do?” Aaron asks.
“There’s a tight true knot in his umbilical cord,” she replies. This knot is what killed him. Jill shows me a photo on her camera, zooming in on the center. The cord is dark and rich with life-sustaining fluids on one side of the knot, and on the other side, the one closest to his body, it is pale. Nothing was getting through. He was starved of all that was created to provide for him.
I don’t ask to see the real thing. It doesn’t occur to me that I might need to hold the knot that took the life from my own flesh and blood. Later, I will think I would have appreciated knowing how that felt.
True knots are rare, happening in about 1.2 percent of all pregnancies. And even more rarely are they fatal, because usually the knot doesn’t tighten so severely.1 We are told he must have done a few somersaults and tied it when he was very small—it was so close to his body. Then when he dropped in preparation for his birth, it would have tightened—slowly or quickly, we’ll never know.
My heart is heavy knowing what happened. On one hand, it’s a small relief to know it wasn’t something we did or didn’t do: ultrasounds can find knots, but because they are so rare, they aren’t routinely screened for, so often go undetected. But that same knowledge brings tremendous grief; his passing happened completely out of our control. We couldn’t have protected him from this.
Our labor nurse, Rose, looks at him lying on my chest. “He’s perfect,” she says. “Does he have a name?”
“Reid.”
We decided months ago. We started referring to him by name in the third trimester, even though we kept Theo as a backup. But Reid fits him—a tribute to my maternal grandfather, Patrick Reid. Parents, siblings, and friends all used it, near the end. We knew who he was meant to be.
Aaron calls both of our parents: “He’s here.” Less than an hour after his birth, my parents arrive. I watch with pride as they lay eyes on him for the first time, gushing over how perfect he is and commenting on which of us he looks like and why. Then I fall apart as they too mourn the loss of a life they have held close to their hearts. It dawns on me that though he died before anyone got to know him, he still made an impact, is still loved, and that many are grieving his death. We are not alone in this loss.
Time passes; nurses come and go. My wet sheets are changed out for fresh ones; I’m given a new hospital gown. Aaron sleeps now on the couch next to my bed, and my parents doze in the corner by the window. It’s still dark out, and the room is quiet. I lie with Reid in my arms. When I close my eyes, I can so easily pretend that he is just sleeping too, that any second he’ll wiggle the way he did in my belly, or cry out to be fed. I memorize the weight of his body in my arms, imprint the image of his face in my mind.
I’m not an early-morning person. I’m not even a daylight person. That’s not to say I’m not ambitious, but days often slip away from me. I can probably count the number of sunrises I’ve seen on both hands. They’re sleepy and cold and pass too quickly. I’m a sunset child. A creature of the night, who thrives on the light from the moon and the stars. My best work is done past midnight. For me, three AM is bedtime, not rise-and-shine time.
The moments before the sun appears can take your breath away. Adventures of the night. The wine-filled evenings with secrets that linger in the air. Those times you went skinny-dipping. That night those sparklers singed your hair. The dreams you lived in before they escaped into the morning sky. The birth of your first child.
In these hours while the dark endures, I hold on to the time that the black skies give me, illuminated only by the stars and the lingering effect of the full blood moon of the eclipse. Until sunrise, Reid is heavy in my arms and perfect in his body. With family surrounding us, and without the reality of the light, I can almost imagine everything is as we’ve dreamed it would be. And in many unexpected ways, it is.
When the sun comes up, the clock will start ticking. We are on borrowed time; Reid has already started to change. But for this moment, in the magic of the night, he is safe in my arms, protected from the harshness of light and time. Reid is simply my baby who has just been born.
4
IT IS STILL early morning, but through the window the darkness is softening. Aaron is holding Reid on the make shift bed beside mine. My parents have stepped out of the room to give us some privacy as our nurse, Rose, does an assessment. She checks my blood pressure first, then massages my uterus to help it contract. As she turns the soft flesh of my empty belly into dough beneath her knuckles, I hear a loud gush of liquid.
“Oh!” she exclaims. She lifts up the sheet to examine what has come out of me and with relief assures me it is just urine. “Do you need to pee?” she asks.
I have to think about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. She looks at me, clearly confused, then checks a screen over my shoulder. It is then that she realizes that the epidural drip has been left running. She mutters a few words under her breath. I say a dozen tiny prayers of gratitude that someone else’s oversight gave me a few more hours free of physical pain.
Rose helps me over to the bathroom and places a basin over the toilet bowl. “You won’t quite know how to do this because you’re still so numb. But it’s mind over matter,” she counsels me. I ask her to run the water, but before she turns the tap my body knows what it needs to do.
Back in bed, I’m overcome with fatigue. Rose asks if we’d like to give Reid a bath. I tell Aaron he can if he wants to; I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute or two. Aaron, looking every bit as tired as I feel, asks Rose if she can do it instead.
“Of course,” she says. She grabs a yellow plastic cup, a basin, and a travel-sized bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo and sets up the bath on the counter across the room from us.
I peer over to her every now and then, watching her carefully rub the soap into Reid’s hair as I drift in and out of half sleep. Later, I will read that it is a ritual in many cultures to cleanse the body of the deceased after they have passed—it’s part of the mourning process. We are only doing what is expected after birth, trying to grasp at any sense of normalcy that we can. But I am glad that he is being cared for this way.
When she is finished, she brings him back over to me. I hold him against my chest and breathe him in.
“Do you want to dress him?” Susie asks, coming back into the room.
We put him in the newborn outfit I’d packed long ago to bring him home in. A white and gray outfit with mittens and a hat and a tiny sweater to match. I struggle to get the onesie over his head—I’ve never dressed a baby before. Susie comes over and holds Reid’s head in place as I pull the fabric down over his face. I study it then, the way it is different
