The Son I Carry in my Heart

 I have been reading old blog posts, specifically one about morbid thoughts I have had during pregnancy. At the time I only had Elisheva and Lydia, but I had worried with both of them about what if they died? Or I died? And then it did happen. I had a son die. I was so young back then. I was 25 years old, and so hopeful for the future. I wanted a big family.  I wanted Avram to get a Ph.d. I wanted Avram to get a job as a professor, and even favored BYU for him to work at. I wanted to live within walking distance to BYU. Check, check, check, check, check. I got everything I wanted. Except Torvald. I did not get my son. I will never have my son in this life. 

And reading my old thoughts, it is strange that now this is my reality. I wanted a standing up headstone then. I still want one now. We buried Torvald in the Provo Cemetery in the older pioneer part, where he will have a fully upright tombstone. This was something that was very important to me. Important enough that I felt like the first tombstone we ordered, which was the same one as the flat ones but would just be wedged upright, was not the actual stone I wanted. We went back and paid three times the price for a fully upright one, and I have less than zero regrets. A tombstone, it turns out, is basically the most permanent purchase one can buy, so it is best to go for what one really wants for it. 

I remember crying at IZ singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow." I still love that song, and I cannot listen to it now - it is too painful. I cry at just the thought of it. I cry at a lot of things now. Today I opened up my file of downloads on my computer, and there were the 3d images of Torvald just a day before he died, and I cried - gut wrenching sobs that are a whole new, unpleasant way of crying I have discovered in the last couple of months. I had no idea when that ultrasound was taken. I was so hopeful, so grateful for him. I thought I might have gestational diabetes, or that he might need a surgery after birth, but that everything would work out fine, with fine here meaning exactly the way I wanted it to. Everything did not work out fine, it did not work out the way I wanted it to. I didn't have any premonitions, after all these years and pregnancies of thinking that I or my baby might not make it. And this time I was a 100% sure he would make it. But he didn't. Torvald was never going to make it. We don't know exactly what (perhaps we will in the future), but he had some kind of genetic difficulties. He never could have lived long, even had he managed to be born alive. My baby was always slated for death.  

Sometimes I want to rage against God. It is so unfair. We love our children. We want our children. This pregnancy had been so hard, so very hard. I had promised God years ago I would have the children he wanted me to have. That has been wonderful and life-giving, but it has also been hard, the hardest thing I had ever done (and that was before Torvald died). Now, it feels like I have been betrayed, that God took my willingness further than I thought I could go. And yet I cannot rage against God. In a blessing after Torvald was stillborn, I was told that God sent us Torvald because he knew that we would love him. And we do love him. And I know deep down inside, in a place that I cannot deny, that he is a blessing to us, and not a curse or a sign that God does not favor us, but rather that we are favored by God. I know this. But it still hurts. It hurts to see others with their living babies. It hurts to see babies that also have genetic struggles, and wish my child was living like theirs is. 

My arms feel so empty. I go about my days, and I am doing pretty well. We have our seven living children to love and to feed, clothe and parent every day. I am excited about our house projects coming up this summer (gardening and landscaping and painting). I love traveling with my family to see nature, and have already lined up our two next vacations. But underneath it all I carry Torvald in my heart. With a living child they grow away from you from the moment they are born. As Dave Barry put it, they are like a comet streaking past, and you are just a small part of that. But for a stillborn baby, he was physically born, but he has never left me at the same time. For seven months I carried Torvald under my heart, and now for the rest of my life I will carry him within my heart. My other children will move away and continue their own existence without me. And I know that Torvald's spirit is in heaven. But I am the monument to his life. The only life he had on this earth was within my own body, within my own soul. 

This is the burden and the blessing of being a mother of a stillborn child. I am the only one who ever held him, who ever substantially felt him move. That is my blessing, and my curse. No one else knew him while he was alive. Very few even saw his little, broken body. To almost all others he is an abstract. But to me he was real, a real person. A person who moved and whom I loved, and still love. And I miss him so much. I miss my baby. I miss the smell of a newborn, and their sleepy milk drunk breath and heavy weight. I feel cheated to have gone through such a hard pregnancy, and such a hard post delivery (I lost a third of my blood. I would have died without modern medicine), and not to have gotten a baby out of it. Not to have gotten Torvald. 

Sometimes I will be doing something mundane and the image of his cold cheek next to mine as I held him will come to me, like an overlay over my life. I hope you never have to hold your dead child in your arms. It is almost unbearably poignant. Exquisitely painful. Because at the same time that I was mourning him, I was also trying to soak up being in his physical presence, because I knew that that day, February 11 was all I would ever have in this life with his body, and it was also the closest to his soul that I could be as well. This was all compounded by the fact that because of my blood loss and continued loss that day that I spent most of the day unable to sit up and unable to hold Torvald at all. I could not even get a whole day with him. I could have kept him over night with me - the hospital was very understanding and helpful. But they had put Torvald in a hospital bassinet that kept him cool, and by the evening when I could finally sit up and hold him again, for the first time since that morning, it was not the same. I could feel that his soul had separated from his body in a way it had not since early that morning when I had birthed him. I need to say goodbye to his body, but it was only his body left to say goodbye to. He was so very cold. 

And so I said my goodbyes. I had Avram leave the room, so I could be alone with my son. Since the morning I knew what I had to do to say goodbye. And so I sang to Torvald while holding him. I sang the lullabies I had sung to all of my children throughout their babyhoods. I sang Baby Beluga, and an Irish Lullaby, and others I cannot even remember now. I cried and I sang, because I knew that this was the only opportunity I would ever be able to do so. Like I needed to store up all my mothering and deliver it at once to him in the form of song. Avram came back and I told him what I was doing, and together we sang Hush Little Baby to him, which is a song Avram has always sung to our children. A week later I remembered a song I had often sung to my children that I had forgotten to sing to him - Mother I Love You, but with the lyrics altered to that child. So I found a moment to be alone in my bedroom and cradled to me the afghan my mother had crocheted for Torvald, and that I knew he would be wrapped in for burial and sang to him, through my tears, "Torvald I love you. Torvald I do. Father in Heaven has sent me to you. When I am near you, I love to hear you, singing so softly that you love me to. Torvald, I love you, I love you, I do." Except I will never get to in this life hear him singing that he loves me. Now I cannot sing to my children anymore. I break down in tears every time I try to sing a lullaby, like they all belong to Torvald now. Thankfully Avram can still sing to our kids.

I also, when I was alone with Torvald, carefully kissed his little feet, his hands, his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth. He was so cold, and so still. But I loved him still. I both treasured my last moments with him, and dreaded them. It was perhaps the second most painful moment of my life to have the nurses take him away (the first being when the Doctor told me they could not find his heartbeat, and showed me on the ultrasound monitor where it should be. Torvald's little body just lay there inside of me, like was was asleep, but with black stillness where his heart should have been moving.) 

Two and a half months later I feel like I spent the time I needed to with Torvald's body. But I am still bitter I was out of capacity for most of the day, that I could not spend more time with him earlier, when perhaps his spirit was more broadly present. Instead I was surrounded by medical professionals working on me. It is sobering to realize a century earlier that not only Torvald would have been dead, but that I would have died also.

But I am not dead. I am very much alive. I love this life. I love my other children, oh so much. I love Avram. I love springtime and blossoms and the feel of the sun on my face. I love breezes and flowers and pretty art and painted rooms. I love nature and beautiful old buildings and my friends and family. But underneath it all, I also love one who is not here. I have never dreaded death, but now I look forward to the day when I am reunited with my son again. Until then it has been a great comfort to me that Heavenly Mother is in heaven, and can be the mother to him that I cannot be. I am grateful we know that there is the divine feminine, and not just the divine masculine. 

There is a picture over our mantel by Brian Kershisnik titled, "Jesus and the Angry Babies." Avram and I picked it out for our anniversary last year because it always made us laugh a little, to see Jesus with a lap full of angry babies. It just feels appropriate to Jesus, somehow. One of the babies is hidden behind the others, with his head just poking out and his eyes showing over another baby's arm. Now I think of that as Torvald, that like that baby he is with Jesus, and although we cannot contact him, that Jesus is in contact with him, is taking care of him. On Torvald's twenty week scan he hid his face from us the entire time. Eve joked that he was saying, "Go away!" to us. After he died of all of our kids Eve, only four, has been the most willing to talk about Torvald, and the most openly sad he is gone. She said within a few days of him dying that now Torvald was telling us that he was going away, to be with Jesus. That is what I think of  every time I see this print - Torvald has gone away to be with Jesus. I know this. I am grateful for a Savior and for the plan of salvation. But I am also still so very sad. I did not want him to go away. I wish I could have had even one moment of holding Torvald when he was still alive. I cannot wait until the day when I can hug his resurrected body.