Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (26 page)

At the same time, the vastness of the cemetery made me feel like one small part of something greater than my own hurt. My loss can feel overwhelming, threatening to enshroud my entire identity. A cemetery full of centuries of strangers was a poignant reminder that we are each living one short chapter of a much longer narrative. In that cemetery, I saw the staggering evidence of generations of parents who have endured the loss of a child, their grief indirectly proportional to the size of those tiny graves.

My friend consulted the map to locate Tennessee William’s grave. To get there, we would pass the Shrine of the Compassionate Mother. As I looked for a statue of the Virgin Mary that would mark the shrine, my friend pointed at the map and said, “Oh, look. Shrine of the Compassionate Mother. That’s you.”

He tossed the comment out lightly, an offhand remark that had just popped into his head. I almost made a follow-up joke about the likelihood of me being compared to the mother of Christ.

Instead, that comment filled up my heart in a way I can hardly explain. To know that he saw the word “mother” and automatically associated it with me—the grieving mother of a stillborn baby. As a mother robbed of all the ordinary opportunities to parent her child, I cherished the association. It astonished me that my pain hadn’t scared this friend away; I was even more astonished, somehow, to discover that he viewed me as a compassionate mother. I hadn’t been able to put any other adjective with the word “mother” in regard to myself except “bereaved.”

But I hope his version is also true. I hope I can ultimately say that Eliza hasn’t made me simply sad. I hope she has made me more
aware and empathetic. She has made me less fearful about confronting broken places in other people, more willing to bring to light the pain and sorrow we often hide.

For so long, I felt loss had wrecked my life. My carefully laid plans were decimated, and I could scream for years about how unfair it is. But it occurred to me, as I walked among the graves, that Eliza could change my life in good ways, even without being here.

Tennessee Williams’s gravestone has an epitaph that reads,
The violets in the mountain have broken the rocks.

I read that line, and then I knelt and traced it with my finger. I thought about tiny, fragile, beautiful things and the enormity of their influence. And then I cried in that huge Catholic cemetery full of people I never knew, each grave representing someone’s grief etched in stone. I cried because I miss my girl more than I can say, and because I know that loving her will make all the difference in my life. It already has.

The year
Frankenstein
was published, Mary Shelley’s one-year-old daughter and three-year-old son both fell ill and died. Their heartbroken mother is now famous for creating a monster who grieves his lack of family. I’ve no doubt she would have obliterated that entire novel and the posthumous fame that went with it to save the lives of her babies. I know because for a long time I played the bargaining game and couldn’t find a single thing I wouldn’t trade to get Eliza back.

Eliza is so many things to me, but she never gets to be simply a sweet baby we brought home from the hospital whose diapers we changed and whose smile lit up our home. She is a precious symbol of unconditional love and devotion, she is our firstborn daughter and our Baby Duck, but she doesn’t get to be what we wanted most: our little girl.

And yet, I can’t deny the many gifts that Eliza brought us. There’s
the way she has connected me to other people, the way she has opened my eyes to the suffering that’s all around us, the way she showed me that my capacity for love and compassion is beyond what I had ever imagined. If I am a better mom and wife and daughter and sister and friend, it’s because of her. I know that my life now is richer and fuller and brighter and truer and fiercer than it would have been if I’d never loved and lost Eliza.

Intangible gifts and character improvements be damned, I still want
her
, my first baby, my sweet girl. I want my husband and I to have that other life, the one I was sure was meant to be ours, the one where we watch all our kids grow up and our heartaches are mundane, predictable, and far away. I want us to be parents who have never cradled a cold, dead baby, who never sobbed to the point of oblivion, who never tasted the metallic chill of shattering loss.

The truth is, I’ll never fully know all that was lost and gained in the moment of Eliza’s birth and death. I’m forced to accept that my life will never be what it might have been with Eliza here. Yet it will also, undoubtedly, be more—more of everything—than it ever could have been without her, Eliza, my first, sweet baby girl, and the abiding love that came with her.

Laura B. Hayden

A
s Larry and I moved boxes into our fixer-upper, a mourning dove slammed into the front bay window, leaving a pinkish splotch on the glass. I recoiled at the notion that a dead bird was lying on the ground just outside. When I went out to remove the bird and its mark on the window, the bird was gone. It must have only stunned itself, revived, and flown away.

Chickadees, cardinals, and tufted titmice filled the pine tree in front of the picture window. I soon grew accustomed to their birdsong and occasional bump, as one mistook its reflection in the windowpane for another bird and flew into the glass to greet it.

Larry and I had been trying to start a family for years, but nothing was happening. In the midst of having begun fertility counseling, Larry suggested, “We should get a puppy.” We had been in our new home a month.

I looked around at our house’s faded exterior, worn rugs, and outdated tiled bathroom. But we had bought the house, like so many other things, for its promise, not its polish. Its fenced-in yard promised to provide a perfect home for a dog.

“A dog needs to be trained and cared for,” I said, playing Mrs. Panza to my Mr. Quixote. I ended with the frequent plaint of the working wife. “I can’t do it all.”

“You won’t.”

Larry had his heart set on a Westie. He phoned a breeder, and we were invited to meet the pregnant pedigree, Jeanne, and her owner,
Judy. I wondered about a dog with a person’s name, but when Jeanne greeted us, she was as licking, gnawing, and sniffing a terrier as she could be.

Judy the breeder greeted us with less fervor than Jeanne, but warmly nevertheless. A sweet face supported her thick glasses. She turned quickly staid over the business of choosing a home for one of Jeanne’s impending pups.

Judy said Jeanne would be a mother on May seventh. She had mated in March. With dogs, fertilization was pretty much a sure bet. Sixty-three days later Jeanne would give birth to, most likely, four pups. My own temperature charts, infertility tests, and disappointing counseling sessions crossed my mind. I began to wish my name were Lassie instead of Laura. Maybe canine breeding odds would rub off on me.

“So you want a Westie?” Judy asked. Since I knew nothing about dogs, I tossed my head as if to relay the question to Larry.

“Oh yes. I want an exuberant welcomer, an intelligent learner,” he said. “Had a Scottie once…Merlin,” he continued. “Merlin was fun, but I’ve always liked the personality of a Westie.”

Judy looked pleased. She shot the next question at me. “So you know terriers too?”

I hesitated. “Larry does. I…never had a dog.”

“I see,” said Judy. “And where do you live?”

This began to feel like an adoption screening. Larry quickly answered, “We just bought a home—with a great yard. Over half an acre.”

Judy looked reasonably satisfied, so I added, “A fenced-in yard.”

Her eyeglasses slightly magnified her widening eyes. “The entire half-acre?”

“Chain-linked,” I said.

“Well, then,” she clucked like a mother hen. “The litter’ll be here in May. I’ll call you then.”

Larry put out his hand. “Thank you, Jeanne.”

“I’m Judy,” she said, shaking on the done deal.

Three months later we brought our tiny Westie home. We ministered to his first-night frights, encouraged his little body over steps, placed heartworm medicine down his throat, and rubbed his belly often. If a puppy is, like a man, what he eats, Piper—named for the player of Scottish pipes—perfectly fit his portion of eight parts dry Puppy Chow to one part canned Mighty Dog.

As weeks passed the Mighty Dog portion increased. I grew more and more uncomfortable with the smell of its moist, meaty byproducts mixed with the dry chow. Before long, a mere whiff of the dog’s food nauseated me—which thrilled me! I made a special trip to the corner drug store and bought a pregnancy test. Actually, I bought three pregnancy tests, and within an hour confirmed I was expecting, once, twice, and then a third time.

“Guess what?” I asked Larry at dinner.

“We won the lottery”

“Better,” I said.

“Reeeaally?” There were almost three syllables in his exaggerated articulation.

“Reeeaally,” I imitated. “We’re having a baby.”

We celebrated that night, clinking chilled Perrier in crystal goblets. I just glowed.

“Good timing,” said our veterinarian. There must have been a range of two octaves between Piper’s yips as the vet administered four vaccinations and the guttural tones the puppy directed to the tabby in the waiting room. “A puppy in July, a baby in March,” continued the vet. “If you keep him out of the nursery now, he won’t resent the baby later.”

Each week Piper napped less and played more, the way a
baby would. The most contented puppy in the world, I thought. Occasionally the thump of a misguided mourning dove on window glass drove him to a barking frenzy. And he obeyed our emphatic, ”No,” whenever he lingered by the baby’s waiting room.

A misguided mourning dove smudges a window. A puppy accident on a rug. These became the least of my concerns

I was spotting.

Doctors and medical books offered no remedies for symptoms that my baby was about to slip away. Instead, they gave odds: a fifty-fifty chance that the pregnancy would miscarry. The books stated a lost fetus is a sick fetus. A sick fetus that would have developed into an abnormal baby.

My doctor ordered bed rest. Larry took on the kitchen chores. He served his first meals with panache. Fat garden tomatoes stuffed with chunks of tuna, backyard squash steamed to a still-crisp perfection, parsley garnishing it all. By week’s end Larry would be heating frozen dinners.