Reading

I reread Harry Potter books 5-7 after Eliza died.

Someone online mentioned that they only reading she could do after the loss of her baby were books she had read before, plots that were familiar, endings she could see coming.  Maybe that was part of it.  I wanted to read a story that would turn out the way I expected it to.

But I also wanted to read Harry Potter because good people die in those books--unfairly and unexpectedly.  And because the dead aren't so far away from the living.  They can't come back to life, but they aren't entirely gone, either.  And because Harry Potter's story starts with his mother's sacrifice.  He's "The Chosen One" because his mother died trying to save him.  He's forever protected by her love.  He is an orphan and he misses his parents terribly, but he recognizes the immense love they had for him.

You know, the kind of love any parent has for a child.

The kind of love we have for Eliza.

* * *

David and I both did a lot of reading during my pregnancy.  I remember sitting on the love seat, slogging my way through a stack of essays to be graded and looking over at David who was sitting on the couch, reading Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way, carefully taking notes, a highlighter tucked behind his ear.  I looked at him and my heart swelled with love.  He was going to be such a good dad.

In the Bradley method, one of the coach's jobs is to provide lots of positive reinforcement for the laboring mother.  David was worried that he'd just end up repeating "Relax, relax, relax," so he started compiling a list of things he could say:  "You're doing great," "I'm so proud of you," "Every contraction gets us closer to the baby," "Just one more contraction," "Keep taking deep breaths," "You're doing such a good job."

"Would you want me to say this?" he would ask, seriously, offering me a new phrase that he had read somewhere.  I would consider it seriously and then we'd add it to or strike it from the list.  Because at that time, we still thought it mattered, what he would say during labor.

He filled an entire sheet of legal paper with these phrases.  I felt so confident about labor and delivery because I knew I wouldn't be on my own.  David was going to be prepared.  He'd know what was happening in each stage of labor.  He'd keep me calm.  He'd make me laugh.  He would be there doing the massage techniques we'd practiced and reminding me to relax and focus and breathe.  We were going to be fine.

Of course that all went out the window.  We weren't ready.  We weren't prepared.  We weren't going to be fine.

When I think back to that night in the hospital, I know that none of those carefully prepared phrases ever entered his mind.  In those terrible, terrible moments, he ended up repeating himself over and over again:  "I love you.  I love you.  I love you."

He must have said it to me a hundred thousand times.

And now I know that what he also meant when he said "I love you" was "Please don't die."

Because when I repeated it over and over to Eliza, that was what I meant.

* * *

A while ago--over the summer, maybe?--I heard about a book called An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.  I was in my car driving home from campus.  NPR was talking about this memoir written by Elizabeth McCracken about having a stillborn baby and a subsequent pregnancy.  It intrigued me.  I specifically remember thinking, "I won't read that while I'm pregnant.  But afterward.  I'll remember that title."

Because God forbid I cloud my pregnancy with negative thinking, right?

It came back to me sometime in the last two weeks--a flash in my head, like Anne's House of Dreams.  Another book with a dead baby in it.

I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived yesterday.  I read the entire thing.

I have read a lot of sad, sad stories online.  Maybe I've read too many of them.  But this book astonished me because nothing else I've read about stillborn babies so closely reflected my own experience.  The facts were different, of course, but all of Elizabeth McCracken's emotional responses so closely mirrored my own that it was almost eerie.  Her reactions were so similar to mine that I felt almost as though I were reading about myself.

Like her, I just thought this baby was a sure thing.

And now I know that we can't really count on anything at all.