Primates of Park Avenue (26 page)

I stayed alone in the hospital the night before the surgery, insisting that my husband needed to be at home with our children. Since I was in the labor and delivery area of the hospital, I heard babies crying as I slept. I jerked awake again and again, realizing I was in the hospital where I had given birth to my children, thinking I had to get my baby, that it was my little girl who was wailing nearby.

Dr. Doogie Howser would do the surgery, and he came by the next day in the morning to tell me, somewhat sheepishly, that it was scheduled for 3:00 p.m. He was sorry for the delay, he said, and then he looked at what I was reading and we chatted a little about Henry James. And then I waited, first alone and then with my husband, talking and doing nothing. I couldn’t eat, but I didn’t want to. Daphne was kicking so hard, fluttering so much, that you could see it through the hospital gown I was wearing. The doctors explained that this had to do with the amniotic fluid seeping away. To me, that sounded a lot like she was suffocating. I kept telling her, in my head and aloud, that I was sorry, and that it wouldn’t be long now. At one point I turned to my husband and said, “We’ve had some good times,” something I always say to him when something terrible is happening, and he smiled.

I thought I was okay as they wheeled me into the OR, which really does look dramatic in the same way it does in television shows when they do those shots from the perspective of the person being wheeled in. I was fine until we got inside, where it was hushed and very somber with bright lights, and everyone in their green scrubs and masks and shower caps, and they started to transfer me from the gurney to the operating table—is that what it is called?—and Daphne fluttered and kicked, and in spite of or because of the fact that they had told me this was happening because nearly all the amniotic fluid was gone and she could not survive, it felt so pathetic that I said something like,
Please hurry, I can’t stand it, she’s
kicking so much
. I noticed a nurse crying—she was wearing a pink surgical mask—and then Doogie Howser was holding my hand and talking to me. He asked me if I had anything surprising, like piercings, that he should know about, and I laughed and we talked about all the surprises he had had along these lines. He kept holding my hand for a long time, which was at once awkward and reassuring, like a date almost, but a date with someone who is about to perform a surgical procedure on your dying baby because she doesn’t have a chance in hell and you can’t sit around and wait to expel her. I asked the anesthesiologist what she was going to give me and she said, “Something to make you go to sleep,” and Doogie Howser rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t think you know what we’re dealing with here. Tell her
exactly
what you’re giving her and
exactly
how much.” She did—it was some kind of benzodiazepine, and I remember telling her that I wanted to give me the maximum dosage, so I would be completely out, gone, but to make sure that I didn’t die from anesthesia. And I wanted clean lines, I managed to say as I was going under; I had children and I didn’t need to die of some stupid, entirely preventable infection.

Afterward my OB was there, and my husband, and we chatted and then Dr. Doogie Howser came in, probably to get a sense of how I was doing. He said hello and asked, “Do you remember what we talked about after the surgery, when you were waking up?” I opened my eyes very wide, feeling alarmed, wondering, searching. I had no idea. “Was it anything we can’t repeat in front of my husband?” I ventured, and everyone laughed except Doogie Howser, and then eventually he left the room and I was left wondering what the hell I had said.
What had I said?
To this day I wonder what I said; to this day my response to losing Daphne is to wonder what the hell I said to Dr. Doogie Howser in the moment I was swimming out of the blackness. The anxious, nagging worry is a black cord that connects me to him, and to her.

The doctors had all said “the pregnancy” and “the fetus” when we discussed what was happening and everything that could not be done. The fetus could not be saved. The doctors could not take any steps to prevent this stillbirth of my fetus. It could not be turned back or turned around or stopped. The fetus was unviable. Then, the social worker who came after “the surgery” called her “the baby.” This sharp and sudden semantic shift was presumably intentional. Shut down the mother in your brain so you can have the procedure. Open up the mother in your brain now that she is dead and disposed of, so you can mourn. The way we always have for the forever which we’ve lost our babies. The social worker asked if I wanted a funeral and I said no. The high-risk doctor had already asked, and had told me that if we didn’t, she would have a “hospital burial,” explaining that basically she would be dispensed of as medical waste. “Which she isn’t,” he was quick to add, and I said, “Well, I guess she is,” since we hadn’t been able to donate any stem cells or use her tissues in any other way. Now the social worker asked if I wanted a memorial box. It had a baby hat inside, she explained, and the death certificate, and a little hand and footprint, and I grimaced, I think, feeling that was outrageous somehow, and ridiculous. I imagined what I might do with such a box—shove it into a dark spot high in a closet? Put it in the storage unit? What? We talked about how I felt singled out—who the hell loses the baby just into the sixth month? You feel safe after twelve weeks, who knew? And
why?
—and she pointed out that all the women in this wing of the hospital had lost their babies during the second or third trimester. A whole wing of us, I thought. Something to feel good about.

Motherhood is carved out of death’s territory as much as it is out of the territory of the living. No one told me that. Not the pediatricians, and not the upbeat magazines like
Fit Pregnancy!
and
New Mom!
. But when I turned to anthropology, to the books on my shelf already and the ones I bought in the months after I lost Daphne, trying to understand, I saw this massive true secret, stretched out but never worn out, across what seemed like eons. Nisa’s losses helped me make sense of my own. And now I learned something else, too, the obvious lesson that had never occurred to me: when a baby or a child dies, the world stops. In a small but very real way, a way that cannot be undone or denied, the world ends. And then slowly, over the weeks and months and years, it is the job of everyone who loved that baby or child, who has ever loved
any
baby or child, to remake the world, to get it to start again. And then again, another job, more work: to somehow find a way to live in a world where something like this can happen. To live with the daily bitter taste and the unfairness. The flat, anguished sensation of having been turned inside out, of being unprotected. The crazed but logical, urgent-feeling need to hide away your littlest one, the one who is left, the obsessive fear that now he or she will be hit by a car or walk into the pool or somehow, anyhow, be extinguished. How long had it been, I wondered day after day, week after week, that women had felt this way, had known this and forgotten and remembered it? It was in us, I knew.

When Lily’s three-year-old daughter died—unexpectedly, quickly, essentially from a cold—we made keening noises and fell to the floor, all of us who loved her, all of us who loved our own children, everyone who heard. The ripples went outward from Lily to us, her girlfriends, first. And from us to all our closest friends, to all their friends and then to every single woman and man with a preschooler in Manhattan. We were stunned, with pinched faces and tight voices and red eyes, as we brought our children to school and talked in the hallways and over coffee and on the phone. We cried and cried. We are still crying. Even those who only knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew her.
No.
How did this happen? It can’t be. What happened, exactly? Why? What will her mother do?

Flora was three and three-quarters years old. Her hair was wispy and blond and her eyes were huge and blue. She was a fussy eater and she didn’t like anyone to touch her head. She loved cooking and school and ballet. She was just becoming herself. One night, about week before she collapsed, she and her big sister came to our house to play with my sons, and while I was getting dressed to go out with Lily and my husband, there was a tiny knock on my door, and there was Flora, with a gift wrapped in white tissue paper and a gold bow.
This
is for you
, she said shyly, smiling, looking at the floor and then daring for a moment to look directly into my eyes. I kneeled and kissed her. “Thank you, Flora,” I said. She had walked so far, all the way down the long hallway of our apartment, away from her mother and her big sister and the other kids and the warm, bright room with the television playing
The Cat in the Hat
, on her errand toward me. She helped me open the gift—a skirt that Lily had made—and then Flora headed back down the hall, all on her own. Later I told Lily this story and she made a choking noise and said, “She was getting so brave. She was doing more things like that.”

She was here, and then she was gone. The mind understands it in pieces, the smallest bits. Not “she is gone” but
She will
not wear that tiny sweater with yellow flowers on it
again, or those pink rain boots
. Her small cubby at school, the one that held her pink backpack and whatever she made in art that week, is emptied out. I am holding her princess umbrella in my hand and she won’t, she can’t, do that again. How much time? How long to assemble all the pieces into a whole and take it in, the loss of her, the truth of her being gone?

Gelada baboon, chimp, and mountain gorilla mothers have all been observed carrying, grooming, and cradling the bodies of their dead infants. Often, they do this for so long that their babies’ remains become mummified. In the case of the chimps and geladas, the mothers carry the corpses of their offspring in highly atypical ways—by the limbs, with one hand, or by mouth—suggesting that, even as they gently care for them, they realize their babies are no more. I felt connected to them whenever I thought of it, like an animal, dragging my deluded hope and heartbreak and instinct with me up and down the avenues, and I suspected Lily did, too. There was no comparing the loss of a toddler, a little person you had known and loved for almost four years, with losing a baby you never met. I was careful not to. But Lily would sometimes say, “I feel like you understand because something awful happened to you.” To all of us. But mostly, most awfully, to Lily. To Nisa. To so many others, singled out for singular, universal, unremarkable, remarkably unbearable sadness.

It took a long time to realize, to really understand, that I was not pregnant anymore. One day I gathered up all the maternity clothes, and all the post-baby clothes—the nursing shirts and nursing bras and the soft sweaters with funny slits and for breastfeeding—and put them in a grocery bag and placed them out on the service landing, the place for garbage and recycling and things to be repurposed as well, in the owner–to-doorman-to-doorman’s-family-or-church cycle that happens in buildings here.
There,
I thought.