Holding Silvan (12 page)

He feels so small in my arms, so manageable, so mine.

As we pass other parents with babies still hooked to machines, they look up at us with distant smiles. Dr. A had wanted us in our own little room so we wouldn't envy the other parents taking babies home. But Silvan is the only baby I want and I have him, right now, in my arms. I want to tell them, “Don't envy us. He's dying,” and yet I'm bursting with pleasure and pride. It's a crazy feeling. I'm triumphant. I'm ecstatic. Mother and child, we stop passing strangers in their tracks. “Oh look at you,” they coo.

WE KNOW THAT PEOPLE REALLY WANT TO HELP, TO BE a part of this dying, to love Silvan now while they can alongside us. David even stumbles across a discussion online about how best to help when a baby is dying. From the details, he realizes the discussion is actually about
us
, and how
we
can be helped. Because the only help I think I need is to have Silvan held, we check the box at the front desk allowing anyone to come and see him and
everyone
comes: neighbors, coworkers, the receptionist of our chiropractor.

My friend Eve flies out from the East Coast to help with the love that people want to give us. I've known Eve almost as long as Maggy Brown. Eve is a talker. She likes to ask questions, to probe. I like how she coaxes my interior world into the light, but I don't think I can be probed right now without pain. I don't want her to pain me. I can't afford for this crisis to damage our friendship, to be disappointed by her. I will need to love her and be loved by her when Silvan is gone.

So, after Eve has come straight from the airport to hold Silvan, I ask her to stay not with us but with mutual friends who set her up with a phone. Eve's gift to me will be to call everyone I know, to pore through my address book, contacting people so that I won't have to endure the awkwardness of telling people who don't know – a month, two months, ten years from now – what has happened. She talks and talks, tells the story over and over.
She draws my friends and acquaintances around us, giving them a chance to help.

Other people offer to fly across the country, across the world, to help. I'm careful in selecting people, and in giving them jobs. My friend who still hasn't told me her marriage is crumbling comes out and takes David to the grocery store. David holds Silvan and sings to him – he has a whole repertoire of songs with his own lyrics suited for Silvan by now; he sings “You are My Sunshine” with Silvan's name in place of “sunshine” – but he can't possibly hold Silvan for as long as I can. He's hungry for some normal activity after all these weeks away from work, and I'm eager to be left alone to do nothing but hold Silvan more. Standing beside my love for Silvan, all other love seems dwarfed, so I send my friend off with David, in this way tending to my relationships without turning from my son.

Next my sister calls from Brazil in a crisis of indecision about whether to come now or after Silvan is dead, and I tell her she needs to get on a plane immediately. Katya has been known to go into a tailspin when she is unsure of something, and I dread that happening to her now. I tell her she needs to meet her nephew.

A few days later, Katya arrives and comes straight to the hospital from the airport. I walk into Silvan's room, and there she sits holding him, next to my mother. Katya looks up, her eyes and face aglow.

“What do you think of my baby?” I ask, the joyous words bursting from me, and I feel my mother flinch the way she does when her children's exuberance stumbles onto the set of what she considers a somber scene.

“He's sooo cute,” Katya says.

For a moment, the sibling link is forged in gold.

The next day, Katya says, “Thanks for telling me to come. No one in Brazil was helpful. They were all saying, ‘He'll be all right…' or ‘I am praying…' They couldn't wrap their minds around doctors in America unable to save a baby.”

“It wasn't just for you,” I say, “Holding him is for all of us.”

 

ONE PERSON WHO does not offer to help is our doula. She has been leaving messages that we still haven't answered until it occurs to David that she's anxious about her final payment. It is now almost three weeks since Silvan's birth and yet I balk at paying her. “She still owes us a post-partum visit,” I say.

“You want her to visit?” David asks, surprised.

“No,” I say, “I never want to see or speak to her again.”

David says I'm being petty and irrational and calls her back; and when she hears that Silvan is still alive, she diplomatically says we don't have to pay her yet – but she does want to make sure that we keep the book she lent us safe, the book about the amazing brains of newborns. When he repeats this to me, my emotions flare again – “ What about the
damaged
brains of newborns? Would she want a book back about that?” I rant – until I realize she has become the scapegoat for whatever rage or shame or blame I feel. She was there when Silvan was damaged. She was the one who suggested I stand in the shower without the fetal monitor. It was in the shower that I felt that big kick that may or may not have had anything to do with Silvan's damage. She did nothing wrong but she was there, and I have nowhere else to dump blame. I will give her back her book, I tell David, but only when she brings the photo of Silvan that she promised to take when he was born. If she expects to be paid, I expect her to face this death.

 

ANOTHER TARGET OF my irrational scorn is the hospital's social worker. Though she reported early on in her notes that we were dealing “as well as can be expected” and that we were “tender with each other,” now she begins to say we are “resistant” to her help. Even as she enters the room, she seems scared of us. But what help can she give? She knows how to arrange for housing, transportation, how to negotiate with insurers. But we are lucky enough (“lucky,” we keep calling ourselves) to live
near the hospital, to have a working car, and good insurance through David's company that continues to support him in his absence. I glare at her when she persists in offering these few things. Worried about us, she passes us off to another social worker. However, this second social worker does not find us resistant. She finds us open to her. She says that when she asks, “How can I help?” we ask, “How can a social worker help with a baby who is dying?” and so she offers help in funeral arrangements, cremation, whatever we will need. I wonder how the first social worker could be so afraid of death and am relieved when I learn she's left this job for something less demanding.

 

FRIENDS DO LITTLE better against the rising tide of my rage and scorn. Our old friends Claudia and Brian say they can't come to the hospital. They're expecting their third child and Claudia says she's afraid she will “make a fool” of herself by crying too much.

Instead, they take turns talking to me by phone, mostly in complaint about their own lives – Claudia's ongoing morning sickness, Brian's commute, which keeps him away from the family for half the week, the fact that this third child has come so late into their lives that they'll be old before it goes off to college. Perhaps they really are engrossed in their own suffering, or perhaps they are trying to commiserate in misery; either way it doesn't work. Maybe they simply disagree with our choice. After all, at the end of the conversation Brian asks, “Why don't you let him die of pneumonia or something else more natural?” There is no judgment in his voice, but I'm so startled to be questioned about a choice that's already been made that I hand the phone to David. And after they hang up, I don't dwell on Brian's question. Instead, I swell with my superior suffering, strutting for David in a rage that others “can't deal.”

 

STILL SWOLLEN, STILL strutting with disappointment and rage, I make the bed for David's mother. She's the only grandparent
who hasn't met Silvan and she's arriving from New Jersey for a week. She's hoping that she has timed it so that she can both meet Silvan and be here when he dies. In the best of times, Linda is loving and sympathetic but always she and David argue. They argue on the phone, too, but their arguments are worse in person. Sometimes David simply argues about her inability to argue well, how she says whatever comes into her mind. This week, Linda brings as fallback conversation her boycott of France. Though she considers herself a savvy liberal, we consider ourselves more liberal, more informed, better able to read between the lines; for us, her boycott of France is misguided. And yet, when David arrives with her from the airport, he tells me that for once he couldn't be bothered to argue politics. I take her suitcase down to her bedroom and tell her what time she will be able to visit with her grandson. I want her to be as obsessed with him as we are. I don't want her to fill the silence with other kinds of conversation.

The week passes with little change in Silvan. He will not die while Linda is here. David and I spend all of our time at the hospital while Linda is ferried around by my mother and David's sister, trying to fill the time she's not with us. So here we are on her last night, at the end of a long day at the hospital, sitting in the living room – Linda, my mother, David's sister – eating dinner in silence from plates on our laps. David and I have nothing to say beyond Silvan and no one else can think of anything appropriate to fill the gloom. Linda rocks back and forth, back and forth anxiously in the glider as if to fill the silence this way. Next to her foot on the rocking footstool lies her empty dinner plate. I watch the plate going back and forth, back and forth. I'm sure she'll break it. I consider getting up to move the plate to a more stable surface, but then I realize I'd rather have the haughty pleasure of having known she would break it. I suppose I want something to break; I want not only the triumph of having predicted that it would break but also to feel this petty pain and anger, because the pain of losing Silvan is anything but petty;
it is entirely unpredictable in its vastness. The strain of loving him is starting to take its toll.

So: I am already primed when Linda begins once again saying what a shame it is but she's never going to buy anything French again – wine, mustard, shoes – or even go to France for a visit, though she's always wanted to see Paris, and I lose it. I jump up. I say, “How dare you talk that way?”

“What way?” she asks.

“That hateful way. My French son…”

She stops rocking.

“ With my French son dying in the hospital…”

“French?” she says, bewildered. “Your son is French?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice rising as I stand up, “my son is French, and my son is Jewish…” After weeks of cramped stress, the expansive light inside my head is as uplifting as champagne. I am more than myself, I have transcended politics, borders, hatred. I feel as though my love for Silvan has transformed me into every mother who has ever lost a child in the history of the world, as if I have become Love itself, and in my heady delusion I say, “Get this
woman
out of my house!”

“Me?” she says, still bewildered, but my rage does not abate. If Linda's not going to break that plate, then something's got to break. David pulls me from the room. For once, he does not insist that I do the right thing. He does not insist that I go and apologize. He's used to my sudden rages, he's used to being the one who civilizes me in petty circumstances, at cocktail parties where someone says something I think too stupid and selfish to keep silent about and he tells me to go back and apologize. But now he seems to understand that I need to rage, that I need to be breaking things. That this is the visit where I will be the one to fight with his mother. That I need to feel righteous. He tells me to go to bed while he deals with her.

In the morning, Linda remains. Here she comes up from the guest room. She finds me in the kitchen alone where she offers to make her chicken soup to leave in our freezer before she
returns to New Jersey. Would I like that? Sure, I say, noncommittally, knowing David would like it. She and David go off to the store and return with a chicken, a parsley root, some carrots, onion and dill, and while she shows me what she's putting in the pot, she says, “I'm sorry I upset you last night. I wasn't thinking.”

“I'm sorry I tried to kick you out of the house,” I say. “I wasn't thinking either.”

“I love you guys,” she says, “and I just want to help.”

I want to say I love her back, but the real and flawed love between a mother and her adult children is too distant and confusing to ponder. I feel as if my love for Silvan has been distilled into something so pure that what other people call “love” is a lie, a mere convenient word. And so I mumble, “Thanks,” and it isn't until she has returned to New Jersey that I feel how hard this must be for her. To love a dying grandson from a distance. As Silvan's mother, I may be suffering the most over Silvan, but as his mother I'm also buffered from the pain. He is in my arms for hours and hours. Seven inches is the distance between us, between my face and his. I can see him perfectly at seven inches away, but even my eyes are starting to betray me. If I sit and look at him for too long, when I look back up the world around me is a blur.

IT GETS WORSE. AS THE FAT LEAVES HIS BODY, SILVAN reveals a different face. In his third week, he looks like a miniature boy of five or six. He has high cheekbones and a pointed chin, and papery eyelids that are usually closed. I can imagine finding this pale, elfin form curled asleep amidst the ferns in my garden. But he only gets skinnier. Those who have visited him once in the hospital, the acquaintances and neighbors who have gone out of their way to meet my dying baby, now realize they may have to come again. I feel their horror and exhaustion. It's easy at first to respond to crisis, but this crisis is dragging on and on. No one we know has ever seen a baby like this before. He has shrunk by now from seven pounds to six or less. His hands are delicate twigs, bird bones, the skin on them almost translucent. The plates of his skull are prominent with sunken patches in between like the skin of a desiccated orange. The first time I feel his spine protruding, I think it must be something in his clothing, buttons, a zipper. Each vertebra protrudes. They're tiny. He's lying belly down on my chest in his pale blue terrycloth pajamas. I run my hand up and down his spine and imagine a lovely length of seed pearls. This is better than thinking of starvation.