Holding Silvan (21 page)

One day, I'm out eating with a friend, both of us with toddlers. Miles is keeping me busy, grabbing cutlery, napkins, wanting to stand on my chair, sit on the floor, pick at old food. In between, I feed myself, listen to my friend. There's no room for anything else.

But suddenly, a grumpy-looking old man at the next table leans over.

“What did you ever do,” he asks me, and I'm sure from his face that he's going to criticize our messy presence here, but he concludes, “to get such a wonderful child?”

What I want to answer stops my tongue. “He was sent to me, as recompense,” I want to say as if I believe life works this way; instead, I say, “It wasn't easy,” sounding like any mother, stunned by the weight and ecstasy of love.

 

STUNNED BY THE weight and ecstasy of love, I want more, more, more.

But if we try again, David warns me, this time he will not be so attentive, he will not give so many foot rubs; and he is true to his word. But at least the third pregnancy is easier. When people ask, “Is this your first?” it's easier to tell the truth by saying, “I have an older one at home.” Usually the person asking says, “Your second!” anyway, but I don't correct them even though inside I'm screaming, “My third!”

It will be another boy, we learn. I've always wanted a girl, but now I'm relieved that I'm having only boys. If I keep having boys like Silvan, I seem to think I will miss him less. I'm unaware of this thinking until the birth – which is easy, I feel like a pioneer woman popping babies out – when the baby emerges not at all dark like Silvan or Miles or David. Ivan has pale skin and pink cheeks and blond curly hair like my own baby hair and Katya's and my father's before that. I stare down at him on my chest and say, “Is he cute?” Again there is that distance between me and
him, the distance I did not feel from Silvan, though Silvan was already far away from me, across the room.

“Look how alert he is,” the attending pediatrician says with pleasure, trying to make me feel good. “Babies born without drugs are so wonderful.” When I don't react, she repeats herself. “Babies born without drugs are great. You did a good job.”

I lie there holding this wonderful baby and wondering how many more children I have inside, how many more children I need to give birth to before I can get Silvan back.

 

IVAN SUFFERS FROM being not just a second, but a third baby. He has two older siblings competing for my attention. Two
first-born
siblings. As if he senses he can't compete, he cries all the time. He wakes easily in the night. Strangers do not flock to him, except to compliment his curly locks. Blessed with a third son, I wonder if I have wished for the wrong thing after all. It almost seems like a mistake, becoming an ordinary, irritated mother, swabbing at pee running down the wall in the dining room, carting a baby and a toddler, both screaming, one in each arm, for blocks.

My mother says she warned me, but I don't remember her warning. She makes up for this by taking my boys for hours. When she returns them to me, they smell both like themselves and like her; this heady broth nestles in the crooks of their necks, and I sniff and sniff at it. Pleasure now has to be measured by the thimbleful such as this, for without crisis, life threatens to become ordinary. I am frustrated once more with David's inarticulate hesitance in talk about movies and books, and he remembers how selfish I can be with my time. With every sentence interrupted, and no meal eaten without the passing of a baby back and forth, or the dropping of a fork, or the spilling of a glass, no night unbroken, we feel almost nothing but misery. There seems not room enough for love. Passing a friend in our no-longer-new family station wagon, David rolls down his window. We have not seen this friend since the birth of their second
baby. But there he is, pushing a double stroller. “How's life?” David calls out.

Our friend looks up, bleary-eyed. “Great!”

I yell across David, “Well, we're in hell!”

Our friend grins in relief. “So are we.”

I have arrived. I can use language sloppily, without apology or contrition. I, who once did not know if I could have any children, can say that having two children is “hell” without qualifying that I have actually had three, or that losing one child is more hellish than raising two. I have become a parent like any other, the miracle of my young children almost buried in all the work.

AS TIME PASSES, AS THE LONG DAYS OF SILVAN'S DYING shrink proportionally against the growing of my children – soon they are one and three, then two and four – I catch glimpses of Silvan in other women's pregnant bellies, painful glimpses, fleeting glimpses. At baby showers, I find I still can't grow giddy with the other mothers over the certainty that soon a baby will be here. The farther my children get from their own babyhoods, the harder it is to hold new babies and smell that distantly familiar smell. In every six-week-old, I lose Silvan all over again.

Spring is the hardest. April 27th to June 4th. Every year, I spend those days in vague dread over an end we have already lived through. On one of those spring days – a lovely, balmy one – I am sitting on a park bench, chatting with the other parents when I notice Miles lying splayed on the sand, unblinking, staring straight up. Perhaps he is dead. A dead child is not something I have to imagine. My heart begins to beat wildly. Perhaps, I tell myself, trying to stay calm, he is merely playing dead to get my attention, to see how I will love him if he dies as his brother did. Suddenly, I am alone, no other parents near, though they sit beside me on the bench. “Miles,” I say with quiet urgency, “Stop it.”

To my great relief, he's alive. To my greater relief, he listens. He gets up and returns to activities that bother me less but probably bother the other parents more, throwing rocks, balancing large plastic toys on the tops of the monkey bars below which Ivan and the other younger children play. Like any parent,
I worry about my children dying. Like most parents, I try to live as though they won't.

 

AS THE WORK eases slightly, as dinner becomes somewhat civilized again, we begin to look for rituals to bind us. We start by lighting candles every Friday night. This is not about a god so much as it is about pausing to be grateful. How grateful I am, how hard to pass gratitude on. Usually we're tired on Friday nights and the children wiggle and giggle until we yell at them to stop, but surely they can find something to be grateful for. We make suggestions. David suggests they feel grateful for the meal I've cooked. I suggest they feel grateful for having food at all. This gives them pause, as it should. For they know about death. They have seen dead flies and snails, they know that their older brother is gone.

Their questions start early, startling me.

“What if Silvan were in this box?” Miles asks one Christmas – for we celebrate that ritual, too – over a present he's opening at my mother's.

“Why would he be in a box?” I ask.

“Wouldn't you like that?” he asks.

A few years later, Ivan pipes up from the backseat of the car. “What if Silvan comes back to life? Would you like that?”

“People don't come back to life,” I tell him.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Maybe,” I concede because it's true; I don't know what's possible.

In dance class, I'm stunned one evening by a vision of Silvan and me and centuries of dead, pressed up against each other in the dark, at the edge of an underground stream. I don't know if I believe in souls that way anymore, but I am in awe of all that a mind can contain, more than we will ever know.

If I could, I would hold Silvan again.

But for now, I have only his ashes in a vase in the living room – after scattering a few on the trail where once I imagined
his conception, I couldn't let the rest go. And in a drawer, his pale-blue terrycloth pajamas. And I have his bench in the backyard. It's a child-sized wooden bench, a plaque attached to the back of it with his dates and a quote from his song, the one we used to sing to him. “You'll never know dear,” the bench says, “how much we love you…” Over time, the bench has become hidden. To find it now, you have to cross to a back corner of the yard, walk up three little stairs of stone, and duck beneath the drooping flowers of an angel trumpet. That was our idea, a hidden place to find if you make the effort. A place to sit and love him.

Often it is children who find it first. They lead their unsuspecting parents there. When the adults reemerge from under the plants, I wait to see if they will say something.

Some do, some don't.

And then one day, I find I can forgive those who don't. Not everyone has to know.

Sometimes even I forget, if only for an hour.

In April, Margie tells me, “I had my Silvan dream last night, I always dream about him this time of year. Is it okay I told you that?”

Yes, of course, I say.

A few days later, I run into Dr. A. He lives in our neighborhood. “Wasn't it Silvan's birthday yesterday?” he asks.

Yes, I say, yes.

Every birthday, David's sister makes a donation to children's hospice in his memory; and David's stepmother calls to thank us for being brave enough to have more children. At my brother's house, I see Silvan's picture. At my obstetrician's office, too. There he is golden amongst a swirl of babies. If there is a miracle to this story, it is that he is remembered. Not by everyone, but by enough. He is my boy, so specifically mine; but in death he can belong to anyone who wants him.

 

I NO LONGER have to tell everyone about Silvan – but my willingness to offer his story remains. One winter morning almost seven
years from his birth, I return to the diaries I kept while he was alive. From my diaries, I retrieve the feel of his skin, the sound of his little cries. I retrieve both the joy and the agony. I find the story of his life. Memory begets memory and within days I know I'm writing a book. Within months, I have a draft. And that fall, when the book is almost ready to be seen, I find myself out in the backyard with my boys on a hot afternoon drenched in yellow sunshine. I am pruning jasmine from Silvan's bench while the boys dig a giant hole nearby. Where the hole will lead them, they don't know, but they've been digging in earnest for over a year. How content I suddenly am, but also worried about my own contentedness. If I end Silvan's story with children in the sunshine, will I have failed to tell the truth about losing him?

That's when I hear them arguing over by their hole.

Ivan wants to talk about what he will do when he is twelve, and Miles is reminding him that he might not live to be twelve. After all, “Silvan didn't.”

“Yesss…” Ivan shouts with four-year-old vehemence.

“But you can't know for sure,” Miles says smugly, “right Mommy?”

“That's true,” I say, “but…”

“I know,” Ivan interrupts, “but I just want to tell you what I'm going to do.”

“Okay,” Miles gives in, and they begin to talk about their future without any reassurance from me until Ivan reminds Miles that I may not live into that future. Now Miles is upset. As I hesitate behind them, trying to find a balance between hope and truth, Ivan says, “One thing you can know for sure is that she's still alive right now.”

“Now that is true,” I say, and they turn to beam at me.

As I beam back, I know something else for sure. Love outlasts grief. Though we can't say for certain we made the right choice for Silvan, our love for him has survived. It is alive this very minute. How lucky I feel. And how full of hope. For I feel it now, hope fluttering up. David comes out of the house to join us then,
and for a single, golden moment in late September I have nothing more to wish for. How strange hope is. Promising nothing but still making sense, it hovers here as all around us red and yellow leaves flame in the lowering sun. Strung between plants, fat spiders wait in the gilded bull's-eyes of their webs. David spots a fly, gauze-wrapped and still. The web trembles. “Look,” he calls to our boys. As we gather around to look, the last of the light reaches through the trees. It sparks off leaves, off a length of spider silk stretched from one end of the yard to the other; it coats our arms and the spaces between us, suspending us in its amber light, linking leaf to arm, and past to present to future. And so we stand here, held in this moment together.

MY GRATITUDE GOES FIRST TO ALL WHO HELPED US HOLD Silvan in life. This includes the amazing Dr. A, Nurse Kerry and the rest of the hospital staff, as well as the family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances and even strangers who became part of his brief life. You know who you are. We did not parent alone and we are deeply grateful for it.

Nor did I parent this book alone. Going as far back as high school and college, I am grateful for my teachers Ann Cromey and Lena Lenček; and later, for the support of established writers: Michael Cunningham, Tobias Wolff, Al Young, Louis B. Jones, Lynn Freed. I am grateful to Micheline Marcom for urging me to keep a diary about Silvan, to Susie Davis and Holly Fleming for knowing it was time to turn those pages into a book, and to Eve Müller whose insight shaped not only this book but the very way I think. I am indebted to Sylvia Brownrigg, brave mother herself, who generously agreed to read the first draft. And to Ayelet Waldman who sought that first draft out – without your swift mind and big heart, this book might never have been published. To the members of my writing group, especially Lindsey Crittenden and Audrey Ferber, who challenged every whining, bitter word, forcing me to become a better person through my prose. For help in ethical research, I thank Rich Gula. For medical expertise, Michael Singer. For general support, more friends than I can
list but especially Eliza Patten, Julia Scheeres, Jenny Pritchett, Laleh Khadivi, Margie Ryan, and Teresa Sharpe.