Empty Cradle, Broken Heart was the title of the book the hospital gave us, along with a blue-and-yellow storage box containing Caleb’s tiny baby hat, a lock of his hair, his hospital bracelet, and plaster imprints of his hands and feet.
Many months earlier I had sent the sonogram to friends and family, showing two babies in one womb: Identical twin boys. Two younger brothers for our oldest.
Caleb was born first. I saw him curled at the end of the operating table, chest down, arms and legs tucked under his body, looking like an alabaster statue of a baby. I asked to hold him, but the midwife said, “Not now. We need to concentrate on getting the other baby out.”
When I awoke from the anesthesia, my husband, Matt, said the babies were both in intensive care. Joshua had had some initial trouble breathing but would be fine. Caleb had lost 30% of his blood from a ruptured umbilical cord and had begun to breathe only after 20 long minutes.
A little more than a day later, Matt sat next to me holding Joshua while I held Caleb against my chest. His breathing sounded tortured, but the doctor assured us that the morphine kept him from feeling any pain. My son lay against me with his head back and his mouth open. It was several hours before he took his last breath.
Later the nurses brought Caleb to me in a bassinet. They had removed the IV and cleaned off the glue from the wires. I looked at him for a while – so small and still – then picked him up and cradled him.
We had Caleb cremated because part of me could not stand the idea of his body lying in a coffin in the ground. What if he got cold at night? What if he cried? When I opened the contained from the funeral home, I expected to see soft ashes like in a fireplace, but it was more like coarse sand mixed with bone fragments.
Our insurance covered Caleb’s thirty-thousand-dollar hospital bill, but first I had to fill out all the paperwork to register Caleb as a dependent – even though he no longer depended on me.
It felt as if I were walking around with no skin, all my nerves exposed. Matt tried to offer me support, but he was barely holding it together himself. One day, after strapping Joshua and our older son into their car seats for an errand, we began having a pointless argument. Back at the house it heated up. I lunged at Matt, swinging wildly. He didn’t fight back but pulled me into his arms so I couldn’t hurt him. I actually bit his shoulder. When I’d stopped panting, he slowly released me. We stared at each other like two wild animals in a cage.
Shortly before the one-year mark, Matt told me we were at a turning point. If we stayed on the same path, we might never recover. We needed to live again. I understood what he was saying, but grief was my main connection to Caleb. I was scared to let it go.
Eventually I realized that my husband was right. Deciding to stop grieving our son was not the same as deciding to stop loving him.
DMB, Cleveland, Ohio
In the twenty-fourth week of my pregnancy, my unborn son was diagnosed with a rare disease called arthrogryposis. His symptoms were clubfeet, flexed wrists, clenched hands with overlapping fingers, and an underdeveloped chin. Tests could not determine whether he would also have an underlying neurological or muscular disorder. My husband and I would have to wait until he was born to find out. I was afraid my son would never walk, would never talk to me.
In the first month after his birth, we visited many specialists, but the doctor we saw the most was our son’s pediatric orthopedist, who was responsible for correcting his clubfeet. The nonsurgical procedure involved 3 months of plaster casts (changed regularly); 3 more months of placing our son’s feet in a metal brace for 23-hours a day; and 3 years of wearing the brace only at night.
The hardest part of the day, after my husband went back to work, was about 10:00 a.m. I would put the baby down for his morning nap, turn on a TV show for my two-year-old, then go to my bedroom, lie on the carpet, and cry. I wanted desperately to see friends but had no energy. If I took a shower, I counted that as a good day. Getting out of the house for anything other than a medical appointment was a feat.
Meanwhile I was jealous of every healthy baby I saw, which itself was exhausting. My anger would explode at the slightest perceived wrong: a comment from my husband about dinner, an inconsolable baby, my two-year-old asking for a snack. After each outburst I immediately felt ashamed.
My first brief moments of delight came as I witnessed my son’s ingenuity at getting around. At 9 months he could finally sit up unsupported. He didn’t have the arm strength to crawl, so he scooted on his bottom, making a grunting noise as he propelled himself through the house.
I soon realized that I’d been so preoccupied with grieving the loss of the child I’d expected that I’d failed to appreciate the child in front of me. It took the better part of that first year for me to begin fully loving my son.
SR
Union City, CA