The baby was a boy. The nurse took him, examined him, cleaned him up a bit, wrapped him in a blanket and brought him back for us to hold.
Even though I’d given birth several times before, I was again surprised at how perfect he was, and like every new mother I examined fingers and toes, fingernails, eyebrows. Everything was there, and so very small.
The most remarkable was his skin, which was dark and shiny, presumably due to the time he’d spent in floating in amniotic fluid after his heart had stopped a week before. In spite of the eerie sight umbilical cord still wrapped around his neck, we gazed at our son for a long, long time, his eight inch length no barrier to our silent speculation on what he may have been like, what he might have done.
Even though we knew this was the one and only time on earth we would see him, finally the fatigue of eight hours of labor, the hour of the day, and the self-consciousness of staring at a dead baby moved us to ask the nurse take him away. We tried not to think about his unceremonious end in the hospital incinerator; had he lived a couple weeks longer and made it to five months gestation, we would’ve been planning a funeral and burial.
Instead the only ceremony we knew about had been suggested to us by a nurse friend and was what we’d just done, bringing from home the blanket for holding him, taking some pictures and giving him a name. These artifacts were among the precious few that attested to his existence, along with sympathy cards, the tiny stocking that had hung on the mantle that December, and a dried up single rose that would be housed in a shoebox for the next 22 years.
That is where they were one morning this week when I got out the box and opened an envelope I’d forgotten about:
Even though I’d given birth several times before, I was again surprised at how perfect he was, and like every new mother I examined fingers and toes, fingernails, eyebrows. Everything was there, and so very small.
The most remarkable was his skin, which was dark and shiny, presumably due to the time he’d spent in floating in amniotic fluid after his heart had stopped a week before. In spite of the eerie sight umbilical cord still wrapped around his neck, we gazed at our son for a long, long time, his eight inch length no barrier to our silent speculation on what he may have been like, what he might have done.
Even though we knew this was the one and only time on earth we would see him, finally the fatigue of eight hours of labor, the hour of the day, and the self-consciousness of staring at a dead baby moved us to ask the nurse take him away. We tried not to think about his unceremonious end in the hospital incinerator; had he lived a couple weeks longer and made it to five months gestation, we would’ve been planning a funeral and burial.
Instead the only ceremony we knew about had been suggested to us by a nurse friend and was what we’d just done, bringing from home the blanket for holding him, taking some pictures and giving him a name. These artifacts were among the precious few that attested to his existence, along with sympathy cards, the tiny stocking that had hung on the mantle that December, and a dried up single rose that would be housed in a shoebox for the next 22 years.
That is where they were one morning this week when I got out the box and opened an envelope I’d forgotten about:
A flood of tears came.
That morning twenty-two years ago was unremarkable, other than the fact that it was my thirty-first birthday. I was a happy healthy mother of three kids and excited about the impending arrival of the fourth.
Come to think of it, maybe it was a remarkable day. I had felt the baby kick for the first time just a week or so before and had finally gotten over being angry about this unplanned pregnancy happening after I’d declared our family complete, ironically signifying its end by giving my maternity clothes away to a gal with her own unplanned pregnancy, and no husband.
At the time, I was quite involved in pro-life activities and remember thinking upon discovering my unwanted pregnancy, so this is what it feels like. I could see why girls would opt for an abortion, a quick solution. I too, felt trapped. One reason I’d declared an end to childbearing was, even though all our babies were healthy, and my pregnancies were uneventful, they had successively gotten longer- my third pregnancy finally ending one day shy of ten months with the birth of a ten pound boy, and that after labor was artificially started. In addition, I didn’t like what such pregnancies and deliveries had done to my body.
So I borrowed some maternity clothes and joined an aerobics class, determined not to gain fifty pounds again and to be in shape for perhaps another long labor. I had also changed obstetricians to one who delivered at a hospital that had a policy against performing abortions. I’d already had two prenatal exams and had heard the familiar chug-a-chug of the baby’s heartbeat the month before.
My exam that morning was routine until I noticed the doctor seemed to be taking a long time with the stethoscope on my belly finding the heartbeat. The baby must be in an awkward position, he said. He tried more angles; I rolled from one side to the other. After some time he said he was unable to find a heartbeat and that I should have an ultrasound at the hospital that afternoon.
That scared me. There’s something wrong, this isn’t routine, there’s something wrong with our baby; I hadn’t dared think the baby might be dead.
I collected our three-year-old son, John, from a friend’s house where he’d been while I was at my appointment (Laurie and Anne, 7 and 10, were in school), and went home. As it happened, my husband, Steve, came home for lunch that day for the purpose of delivering a single red rose for my birthday. With guarded tones I told him about my morning and the ultrasound appointment that afternoon and asked if he would be able to go with me.
He met me at the hospital that afternoon. I didn’t know how he felt, but I felt like I was in slow motion, in a dream, a bad dream. The ultrasound exam table was freezing cold; why did it have to be so cold? I began to shiver uncontrollably, much like I had during the delivery and following the births of our children.
The technician applied the cold gel to my promisingly-bulged belly. On the screen we could see our baby for the first time. He or she (wanting to know the gender didn’t even occur to us) looked whole. I suppose I lay there thirty minutes while she traversed all possible landscape with the doppler to detect a sound. Conversation –what little there was– was awkward; she gave no indication anything was wrong although we could see no heartbeat, it was much too quiet. I stopped looking at the monitor. She said we would meet with the doctor at his office to learn results.
It was 5:00pm by the time we got to the doctor’s office. While we waited for the doctor I read a magazine article about a woman who’d had a miscarriage. The doctor called us in. All I remember him saying is, “The baby is dead.” The disbelief and denial of the preceding hours gave way to tears. We cried.
With the tears came a flood of questions: Did I do something to cause this? What happens now? How would the dead baby be removed? And this absolutely terrifying thought: Would I have to go through labor and delivery?
The doctor assured me that nothing I did caused the baby to die and recommended we wait for labor to start on its own and if it didn’t in a week, labor would be initiated. Since we had driven to the appointments separately, I drove home alone and I took the opportunity to wail loudly.
Once we were home, having picked up the kids, we gathered in the living room. The kids sensed from our demeanor and reddened eyes that something -some terrible thing- had happened. I sat limply in the rocking chair as we explained that the baby had died. Anne and Laurie understood what that meant -in the past year three of their great grandparents had died- and cried along with us. John, at three, only knew that everyone was crying and was afraid. We explained the baby was in heaven, the only comfort available at the moment. I put the red rose in the baby’s new stocking on the mantle.
Labor didn’t start on its own and we went in to the hospital five days later. I knew that the focus required to use LaMaze breathing to control the pain, as I had done with my previous labors, would need to be far greater considering the result would not be a wailing baby. The contractions started out steady and got increasingly stronger.
About six hours into the eight hour ordeal, I closed my eyes to keep focused, and kept them closed; Steve thought I was asleep. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes and telling him I wasn’t sleeping for fear of losing concentration. Then came the irresistible urge to push, but I had to wait for the doctor to check my cervix. With one push, the baby was born.
I don’t remember much emotion at that moment except great relief that it was done. I hadn’t let myself think about anything other than the formidable task at hand. Now that it was done, I was mostly numb, and exhausted.
We went home to resume life and ponder other questions like, physiologically, why did this happen? We got some insight a week later when the pathology report arrived in the mail from the autopsy that we had requested. We had wanted to know of any abnormalities in case we would decide to conceive again. After a lot of technical lingo, the report concluded that, “no definable ideology of death was determined”.
That, with the fact of the baby being born with the cord wrapped around his neck, confirmed in my mind what I had begun to fear, that I could pinpoint the exact moment of his death.
It was two days before that fateful doctor’s exam that Anne and I were driving home from Wednesday night church activities. I remember exactly where we were on the road home when I made a comment to her that the baby must be a gymnast considering how much he was jumping around just then. I don’t recall any movement after that. Of course, there is no way to know for sure that he was suffocating just then, and I am thankful that I didn’t know it, because there would’ve been nothing I could’ve done about it.
The BIG question of course was theological, Why did this happen? Why did God let our baby die? I came to the inescapable conclusion that we live in a broken world where pain and death are very much a daily occurrence. Specific reasons beyond that were unknown then, but since have become somewhat clearer. As it was, the pain I was living helped me to long for that place where death and pain won’t be part of the landscape.
Which brings me to this Saturday morning- the day between Good Friday and Easter. In the predawn darkness I was listening to a radio broadcast of a Death Mass sung in Latin. The haunting, heavy dissonant sounds acutely conveyed the tragedy of death, Christ’s death. I closed my eyes and imagined that scene in Gethsemane where he not only cried tears of sorrow, but experienced the unimaginable -even to him- excruciating sweating-blood pain of the entire history of this very broken and defiant world.
In that listening dissonant moment it occurred to me that my recent shed tears were but a portion of the sum of his. I thought of the miscellaneous brokenness in lives I’d encountered in just the past month: a marriage gone sour, the stranglehold of addictions of various kinds, emotional deadness, bitterness, busyness, my left hand not being able to type very well, my own pride.
I remembered reading a simple but profound summary of the most important thing I’ve learned in the last few years about the ‘why’ of sorrows and tragedies from Frederick Buechner in his book Telling the Truth: “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”
This is the shocking, surprising truth that can be discovered through brokenness the size of Job’s, or my own, the life-giving gospel truth that easters up in us in the midst of the pain common to man. Incredibly, the Creator of the universe bends to tenderly embrace, dry tears, heal, and put life into things long-dead.
Time itself is measured from the centerpiece event where God gave himself: Mary’s baby was a boy. The God-man grew up in this same broken wailing world, submitted to death, and then did the unimaginable by walking out of his tomb.
That morning twenty-two years ago was unremarkable, other than the fact that it was my thirty-first birthday. I was a happy healthy mother of three kids and excited about the impending arrival of the fourth.
Come to think of it, maybe it was a remarkable day. I had felt the baby kick for the first time just a week or so before and had finally gotten over being angry about this unplanned pregnancy happening after I’d declared our family complete, ironically signifying its end by giving my maternity clothes away to a gal with her own unplanned pregnancy, and no husband.
At the time, I was quite involved in pro-life activities and remember thinking upon discovering my unwanted pregnancy, so this is what it feels like. I could see why girls would opt for an abortion, a quick solution. I too, felt trapped. One reason I’d declared an end to childbearing was, even though all our babies were healthy, and my pregnancies were uneventful, they had successively gotten longer- my third pregnancy finally ending one day shy of ten months with the birth of a ten pound boy, and that after labor was artificially started. In addition, I didn’t like what such pregnancies and deliveries had done to my body.
So I borrowed some maternity clothes and joined an aerobics class, determined not to gain fifty pounds again and to be in shape for perhaps another long labor. I had also changed obstetricians to one who delivered at a hospital that had a policy against performing abortions. I’d already had two prenatal exams and had heard the familiar chug-a-chug of the baby’s heartbeat the month before.
My exam that morning was routine until I noticed the doctor seemed to be taking a long time with the stethoscope on my belly finding the heartbeat. The baby must be in an awkward position, he said. He tried more angles; I rolled from one side to the other. After some time he said he was unable to find a heartbeat and that I should have an ultrasound at the hospital that afternoon.
That scared me. There’s something wrong, this isn’t routine, there’s something wrong with our baby; I hadn’t dared think the baby might be dead.
I collected our three-year-old son, John, from a friend’s house where he’d been while I was at my appointment (Laurie and Anne, 7 and 10, were in school), and went home. As it happened, my husband, Steve, came home for lunch that day for the purpose of delivering a single red rose for my birthday. With guarded tones I told him about my morning and the ultrasound appointment that afternoon and asked if he would be able to go with me.
He met me at the hospital that afternoon. I didn’t know how he felt, but I felt like I was in slow motion, in a dream, a bad dream. The ultrasound exam table was freezing cold; why did it have to be so cold? I began to shiver uncontrollably, much like I had during the delivery and following the births of our children.
The technician applied the cold gel to my promisingly-bulged belly. On the screen we could see our baby for the first time. He or she (wanting to know the gender didn’t even occur to us) looked whole. I suppose I lay there thirty minutes while she traversed all possible landscape with the doppler to detect a sound. Conversation –what little there was– was awkward; she gave no indication anything was wrong although we could see no heartbeat, it was much too quiet. I stopped looking at the monitor. She said we would meet with the doctor at his office to learn results.
It was 5:00pm by the time we got to the doctor’s office. While we waited for the doctor I read a magazine article about a woman who’d had a miscarriage. The doctor called us in. All I remember him saying is, “The baby is dead.” The disbelief and denial of the preceding hours gave way to tears. We cried.
With the tears came a flood of questions: Did I do something to cause this? What happens now? How would the dead baby be removed? And this absolutely terrifying thought: Would I have to go through labor and delivery?
The doctor assured me that nothing I did caused the baby to die and recommended we wait for labor to start on its own and if it didn’t in a week, labor would be initiated. Since we had driven to the appointments separately, I drove home alone and I took the opportunity to wail loudly.
Once we were home, having picked up the kids, we gathered in the living room. The kids sensed from our demeanor and reddened eyes that something -some terrible thing- had happened. I sat limply in the rocking chair as we explained that the baby had died. Anne and Laurie understood what that meant -in the past year three of their great grandparents had died- and cried along with us. John, at three, only knew that everyone was crying and was afraid. We explained the baby was in heaven, the only comfort available at the moment. I put the red rose in the baby’s new stocking on the mantle.
Labor didn’t start on its own and we went in to the hospital five days later. I knew that the focus required to use LaMaze breathing to control the pain, as I had done with my previous labors, would need to be far greater considering the result would not be a wailing baby. The contractions started out steady and got increasingly stronger.
About six hours into the eight hour ordeal, I closed my eyes to keep focused, and kept them closed; Steve thought I was asleep. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes and telling him I wasn’t sleeping for fear of losing concentration. Then came the irresistible urge to push, but I had to wait for the doctor to check my cervix. With one push, the baby was born.
I don’t remember much emotion at that moment except great relief that it was done. I hadn’t let myself think about anything other than the formidable task at hand. Now that it was done, I was mostly numb, and exhausted.
We went home to resume life and ponder other questions like, physiologically, why did this happen? We got some insight a week later when the pathology report arrived in the mail from the autopsy that we had requested. We had wanted to know of any abnormalities in case we would decide to conceive again. After a lot of technical lingo, the report concluded that, “no definable ideology of death was determined”.
That, with the fact of the baby being born with the cord wrapped around his neck, confirmed in my mind what I had begun to fear, that I could pinpoint the exact moment of his death.
It was two days before that fateful doctor’s exam that Anne and I were driving home from Wednesday night church activities. I remember exactly where we were on the road home when I made a comment to her that the baby must be a gymnast considering how much he was jumping around just then. I don’t recall any movement after that. Of course, there is no way to know for sure that he was suffocating just then, and I am thankful that I didn’t know it, because there would’ve been nothing I could’ve done about it.
The BIG question of course was theological, Why did this happen? Why did God let our baby die? I came to the inescapable conclusion that we live in a broken world where pain and death are very much a daily occurrence. Specific reasons beyond that were unknown then, but since have become somewhat clearer. As it was, the pain I was living helped me to long for that place where death and pain won’t be part of the landscape.
Which brings me to this Saturday morning- the day between Good Friday and Easter. In the predawn darkness I was listening to a radio broadcast of a Death Mass sung in Latin. The haunting, heavy dissonant sounds acutely conveyed the tragedy of death, Christ’s death. I closed my eyes and imagined that scene in Gethsemane where he not only cried tears of sorrow, but experienced the unimaginable -even to him- excruciating sweating-blood pain of the entire history of this very broken and defiant world.
In that listening dissonant moment it occurred to me that my recent shed tears were but a portion of the sum of his. I thought of the miscellaneous brokenness in lives I’d encountered in just the past month: a marriage gone sour, the stranglehold of addictions of various kinds, emotional deadness, bitterness, busyness, my left hand not being able to type very well, my own pride.
I remembered reading a simple but profound summary of the most important thing I’ve learned in the last few years about the ‘why’ of sorrows and tragedies from Frederick Buechner in his book Telling the Truth: “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”
This is the shocking, surprising truth that can be discovered through brokenness the size of Job’s, or my own, the life-giving gospel truth that easters up in us in the midst of the pain common to man. Incredibly, the Creator of the universe bends to tenderly embrace, dry tears, heal, and put life into things long-dead.
Time itself is measured from the centerpiece event where God gave himself: Mary’s baby was a boy. The God-man grew up in this same broken wailing world, submitted to death, and then did the unimaginable by walking out of his tomb.
More than answers to pain, more than a pathology report, what we really need is him.
As it turns out, he is more than enough.
