Part Two.

I have started several posts about Ames in the past month, but have finished none of them. Every night for the last week I have rearranged sentences in my head before falling asleep, trying to find some way to talk about him, and I am foiled again and again by how complicated it all seems, and how tired it makes me to try to tease any order from my thoughts. And the longer I let it go, the more there is to say, and thus the more daunting the task of saying it becomes. The talented Tash wrote a post in which she quoted Amy Bloom: “Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”

I switched psychiatrists recently, and during the obligatory first appointment evaluation, he asked whether I ever feel guilty about anything, and I laughed. Not a tight, sarcastic laugh, but the laughter of the genuinely amused. If there were an Olympics for neurotics (and just imagine the opening ceremonies—the narcissists fighting over the torch, the claustrophobics streaming for the exits), I have no doubt that I would be a medal contender in that category. Sure, anxiety is my specialty, my meat-and-potatoes, but everyone needs a hobby, and guilt is mine. I sometimes read the stories of other women who have had stillbirths or lost a twin, and after sympathy, guilt is my primary reaction, because I should have been where they were, and I wasn’t.

I was devastated when Ames died, but more than that, I was scared. Simone was still in what felt like a uterine death chamber, and when my cervix began to soften, my contractions to increase, the equally terrible possibility that she wouldn’t remain there until viability reared up before me. Within a few days after the no-heartbeat ultrasound, all of my focus had shifted to keeping my remaining baby alive. They say people form strong bonds in times of stress, and after learning Ames was dead I felt closer to Simone than I had to either of the babies before that point.

You know what happens next. Bedrest, bedrest, and more bedrest. A hospital stay, labor, and my eventual C-section. And after it was all over I was giddy with accomplishment, and an amazed, joyful love. I had a BABY, I kept thinking over and over to myself.

They brought Ames to me in recovery, dressed in a pale blue outfit with a hood, a sort of cloak. I would have preferred him wearing nothing at all, as the contrast between his body—marinated for a month after death—and the frou-frou gown was grotesque, like a macabre Little Red Riding Hood. I was on morphine, high from the exhilaration of birth, the long siege over, and all I could think, looking at Ames in his blue hood, was that he looked like Skeletor. Scott held him and cried and I sat staring into his tiny face, wondering what was wrong with me.

With a stillborn baby, you get only one concrete physical image, and it is the image of a corpse. There was beauty, even so: Ames’ perfectly formed feet and long-fingered hands. Still, I could never understand the insistence upon regarding his body a month after death—a time when none of us would be at our best—as essentially him. I could feel Ames stomping inside of me when he was alive, I saw him kick and twist and wiggle on the ultrasound screen. He was not his corpse. Some relatives wanted pictures to display, and this bothered me more than I can express to you. It was not how I wanted him remembered, and I considered his appearance at birth to be private. He still felt very much a part of me, and one of which I was protective. No one else got to know him as he was before he died? Tough. This is an unfortunate fact of biology—I don’t make the rules.

I decided I wanted to see him again, and so the next day we were to say goodbye and send him to be autopsied. There was some confusion about when he’d be brought to my room, and a long wait, and then a nurse (insistent on giving me my 5:00 laxative and changing my bag of fluids) bursting in while we held him. I had arranged for a visit from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, an organization that takes photos of stillborn babies for their families. Ames was naked, fragile and softening. Because of how much time had passed since his death, he weighed only a little more than half a pound, and his skin was a nut brown. I had come down from my post birth high enough to register emotion, and finally, I cried. My in-laws came in to see him, briefly. And then it was just the three of us.
I held him, touched him—we had to be very careful—and gave him a kiss. I think I sang him a song. Scott thought he would have looked like me, that he had my chin. We could see so clearly who he might have been, something I search fruitlessly for in the pictures we have from that day. I gave him my middle name: Michel.
The worst part of the protocol is that the time you have is open-ended, and it is up to you to notify the nurse that you are “ready” for them to take your baby away. Ready! It feels like the worst kind of betrayal. We had a few false starts—I handed Ames to Scott to return to the bassinet, and then wailed for him back, sobbing. But eventually we did it, we wrapped him up and called the nurse, and he was gone.

If Ames had been a singleton, his death would have been the beginning of a fierce, consuming depression—this I know. Four years ago, after my miscarriage at seven weeks, I cried every day for months, quit my job, gained fifteen pounds, and obsessively tracked where I would have been in an alternate universe where that baby had lived. I can only imagine how incapacitated I would have been by a loss at the cusp of viability. But as Ames was wheeled to the morgue, Simone was very much alive, having perfusion problems from blood draws and dobutamine, and there was talk that day of her losing her hand or a finger. I was focused on learning to pump, and re-learning to walk so that they would let me go to the NICU. If Ames had been a singleton I would have been alone with my husband as my still baby was rolled away down the hall, my leaking breasts a mockery, my head empty and black inside. IF Ames had been a singleton.

But he wasn’t. And instead of mourning him as he no doubt deserved to be mourned, I gave him little thought in the coming months while I sat at Simone’s bedside, feeling judged and annoyed by those who insisted upon talking about him, and too guilty about my lack of mourning to post about him here. In case you imagined I was grieving him in secret, let me be clear: I wasn’t. First my fear and later my happiness left room for nothing else. If I thought of Ames at all it was in shame; it seemed unfair that others had to endure the crushing grief of a late-term loss, and instead I had somehow snatched Simone from the snappy jaws of fate and skipped neatly over the sorrow with my name on it.