dress him. As he lies on my lap, it occurs to me that he was a part of me for his whole entire life and now here he is, suddenly separate. I want to repair our bond, to somehow absorb him. I want to find our way back to the time and place where he was alive. I want to be together again.
I always thought, somehow, that death would follow the rules. This was supposed to be a beginning; now we are at an end. In this world we now live in, life-altering things happen with no apparent reason or warning.
The rest of our family members arrive. Aaron’s parents, our sisters and their significant others, my maternal grandmother. They enter our room one by one, and it is torture to look them in the eye. I am keenly aware that had Reid been safely delivered into our arms, this is exactly the scene that would have played out—family and friends gathering at our bedside, only it would have been to welcome our son into the world with celebration. Now, as I realize with my stomach churning, they are coming to us in sorrow. It isn’t fair. And yet seeing Reid in the arms of our loved ones feels right. I only wish more people could be here to hold him.
I watch Aaron hold our son, both pain and pride written on his face, a father’s love for his child bursting into the room. I don’t ever want to forget this moment. My own heart throbs to see how Reid can’t meet his gaze, to grasp that he will never get the opportunity. I think of the God that I thought I believed in and can’t understand why we find ourselves in this reality. Still, I find some comfort in knowing that the first face Reid saw was His. I am sure I only close my eyes again for a minute, but now everyone else is gone and a woman I don’t recognize is at my bedside. The skies are starting to brighten and I know that things will start to move quickly now. The woman introduces herself as the social worker and starts to talk about support groups, funeral arrangements, forms to fill out. I can’t absorb any of it. Reid is still in my arms, wrapped in the swaddle I had packed in his hospital bag months ago. A white swaddle with red, gray, and black details, speckled with bears—I’d forgotten how cute the pattern was. I adjust his body; the weight of him is making my hand go numb. He is right here, in my arms, and this woman is talking about all of these terrible things we’ll have to do when he is “gone.” Gone. I mull that over and continue to nod as she speaks. I don’t care what she is saying; everything she is saying feels wrong anyway. I continue to stare at my beautiful boy as she talks.
“…you won’t get a birth certificate,” I hear her say. “So, here’s the form for the certificate of remembrance that you can get. It’s a really beautiful memento; they do an excellent job.” She taps her pen lightly to her clipboard as if to emphasize that point.
My eyes jump up to meet hers. “Sorry, what did you just say?” I can hear my voice crack as my mind fumbles to process her words.
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” she falters. “You don’t get a birth certificate.”
“We don’t get a birth certificate?” This woman can’t be serious. “But he was born five hours ago. Look at him.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. So sorry. But he didn’t take a breath. So…” she trails off and gives me a pitiful half smile as she looks at my son. “He’s perfect.”
“Yes,” is all I can manage as I choke back the tears, “he’s perfect.”
I wrestle with many things immediately following Reid’s death, but none more than this: What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the time-line in which they occur. It’s unsettling.
When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don’t know. I don’t think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?
The person down the hall from me with a breathing baby to hold will receive a paper, one that confirms that, yes, a birth has taken place. I, however, am only given permission to remember. No proof of birth. No proof of either life or death. It doesn’t make sense that someone in government, someone who doesn’t know me, whom I’ve never met, has the power to decide what this baby means to our family. Nothing makes sense. He is right here in my arms.
At seven thirty, our new day nurse, Ava, comes in to introduce herself. I like her immediately. She is young, but it’s clear that all she wants to do is make the hours we have left with Reid special. She says she will call a photographer to take portraits, if we want. She also says the hospital chaplain will be arriving soon and she can ask him to do a baptism. Whatever we want, she will make it happen. She repeats this to us over and over again.
The problem is, we don’t know what we want. None of my lists or plans included things we might want to do with our stillborn son while we have the chance.
“We should do everything we can, right?” I ask Aaron.
“I think so,” he agrees. “We won’t get another opportunity.”
So we do what we can. We say yes to the professional portraits and the Christian baptism and the castings of his hands and feet. We do it all. And yet, we know we will always wish we’d done more.
The longer I hold him, the more he changes. Fluids escape through his nose from somewhere else in his body, like a river carving new forks in its passage. I wipe the liquid up with the edges of his swaddle, and for a moment I imagine that he just has a runny nose.
Right then, Micaela, one of my closest friends, who is also a nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the children’s hospital down the hall, appears. She is balancing a large, flat rectangle, covered in pale-green hospital blankets, in her outstretched hands. She is crying.
“We have to put him on ice now,” she chokes out. Only then do I notice the rectangle in her arms is a bed of ice. “But he’ll still be warm. We’ll wrap him up in this.” She tucks the swaddle up under his chin. I look at her and help with the swaddle. Should I tell her that he won’t be warm? Should I tell her it doesn’t matter? Reid isn’t in his body anymore. This is a corpse.
They say that some families take the body home. Sometimes it helps to see the child in the car seat, the nursery, the bassinet. I almost believe that I can. I’ll strap Reid in and we’ll walk through the halls toward the elevator; another new family will lean over to marvel at the tiny being we too are bringing home. Then their faces will melt with horror. “Yes, well, he died,” we’ll say. “But isn’t he perfect?”
No, no. There is absolutely no way I could manage it. I am glad they offered, though. Later, it will be the things they didn’t offer—things I didn’t know I could have done—that I will grow to regret: not taking a lock of his hair or looking at his eyes or singing songs to him, not taking every opportunity to make more memories with him as a family. But if I bring him home I’ll have to bring him back, and I don’t imagine I’ll have the willpower to do it. They will have to send someone to pry his cold body out of my trembling hands. “But isn’t he perfect?”
At four thirty in the afternoon, after fourteen hours and six minutes with Reid, Aaron and I look at each other. Our eyes are swollen and red. I’ve never seen such a look of defeat on his face. We haven’t been given a limit to the time we can spend with our son, but in this moment we know, as well as we will ever know, that we are ready to leave his body. As much as I don’t want to say goodbye, I also desperately need to.
“Are you ready?” I ask, knowing how stupid the question sounds. He nods, knowing how wrong the answer feels.
Earlier, Ava had offered to be with Reid after we left,
