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Blood flowed. Metal met bone. Fists connected. I sat on the living room couch, a Playstation controller in my hands, commanding lives beneath my thumb pads. The wrestler I was puppeteering would in June of that year, after killing his wife and before committing suicide, murder his son. On that last, I had him beat by five months.
My wife Missa is a nurse. As is my mother, my sister, my grandmother, an assortment of aunts. I don’t like hospitals myself. Walking down the hallways of one, I felt like the soundtrack of a horror movie was playing a drunken symphony of whooshes, beeps, and whispers, and that I was an actor in that movie. I know death was behind every door, and I still went through them, ignoring the audience’s catcalls. This hospital was no different. Only upon reflection do all the clues click to me. The pause in the nurse’s speech after she first tried to get the heartbeat. The change in rooms to perform an ultrasound. Her need to get the doctor, leaving us behind to stare at a screen of silent static. The doctor passed his decree through a mixture of goop and stillness, then floated to other rooms.
The doctor suggested a dilation and curettage. Missa had seen one during her nursing clinicals and resisted the idea. There were other approaches considered safer, but this was a military hospital and was several steps behind those in the civilian world. Missa talked to the nurse on the phone and was told the doctor would prescribe Misoprostol, often used for ulcer prevention, but also for inducing labor or abortion. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Misoprostol can be self-administered. My wife did not foresee any problem with doing this at home. The only thing I needed to do, she said, was to insert the Misoprostol, as it would be difficult for her to do. She put a dark towel on the bed and a white disposable pad on top of it. She lay on top of them The pills were tiny, no bigger than the allergy pills I often forget to take. I lubricated two of my fingers and inserted the pills with a fishhook motion, like a wrestler cheating out of the referee’s view.
“What now?” I asked.
“We wait.”
I stood silently, listening to San Antonio snow whisper goodbye like a Dali clock off the roof. Missa explained the process could take a while, so I should find something to occupy myself. I asked her if she wanted anything--perhaps some cake from my stepdaughter’s birthday the previous day. Celebrating had been muted, so there was plenty of cake remaining. Missa passed on the offer. I went into the living room and powered on the Playstation. Beating somebody up sounded good to me.
I performed my medical procedure at ten minutes to three in the afternoon. The rejection of a nearly three-month-old fetus is a muted and mocking form of labor, like hearing a favorite song played by untalented and bored children. Instead of doctors and nurses, there is only a hapless husband, taking sabbaticals from smashing people in the head with a metal chair to see if there is any help he can provide. There was not. There was no room of eager relatives looking up at every swoosh of the door; there were only empty chairs and a telephone to be ignored. This empty labor lasted five hours and at the end, there was no crying from a stretching baby covered in blood and what appeared to be congealed bacon grease. There was only a tiny pinkish creature, some cross between a tadpole and a Spielbergian alien.
My wife called me into the room, and I saw the small blob, a bullseye on the dark blue of the towel and the whiteness of the pad. There was surprisingly little blood. I looked at the small form. It was barely half the length of my thumb. A fetus at eleven weeks has formed some recognizable features--it was recognizable as human, but it appeared to be a human drawn by a talented toddler. The arms and legs were discernible, but there was a tone to them that I could only think of as tabula rasa. Those arms would not freckle. The mouth was a tiny line, as if at the last second someone thought to draw a smile on its features. The eyes were drops of blue ballpoint pen stains. The gender was indistinguishable, but my wife insisted it was a boy. His name was Dane Xavier.
We had a baby blanket we were never going to use. Missa cut a small section out of it and put the fetus on one side of it, folded it over, and folded it over again. She put the blanket into a sandwich bag. I watched my wife perform all this with cool efficiency. She worked in a hospice and often caught a final breath. Before Dane, I had seen one dead person in a casket.
We discussed what to do. Missa wanted to cremate. I wasn’t positive, but I couldn’t think of what else to do--flush it down the toilet, bury it in the backyard. There seemed no good solution. It was late at night, and we had to wait to go to the funeral home, so the fetus went into the closet with shoes, shirts, pants, and boxes of papered history. Missa said there wouldn’t be any issue with decomposition, which was beneficial as our daughters didn’t have to see the sandwich bag in the freezer. We put the bag on a high shelf the dog couldn’t reach.
The person we talked to at the funeral home said it would cost fifty dollars for cremation. I wrote the check, and Missa took the bag out of her purse like a packed lunch. A few days later we were given an urn the size of a closed fist. It was put on our dresser, next to a box my wife had put together, like a time capsule, with baby socks, sonograms, the pregnancy test. This is your life for the pre-birth crowd. The check was never cashed.
The average temperature for cremation is between 1600 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes approximately two to three hours to cremate a human body. A person who weighed 150 pounds would be completely cremated at roughly the rate of a pound a minute. It would only take a second or two for Dane.
How do you mourn what never was? The collected ashes on my dresser are a person with whom I never interacted, never shared a pizza, never tossed a ball. He would never come hesitantly from school, stuttering to explain a bad grade or a black eye. He would never experience a first kiss. There would be no bones to break, no casts to sign. He was a world of not, a life of never.
We held our own memorial service and moved on. The world asks how everything is, and you say fine. Never mind waking up at three in the morning to a wife’s sobbing and the comfort that can not be provided.
Life is a highway, notable automobile spokesman Tom Cochrane told us, and we drove on. One passenger gets dropped off, and another gets picked up. Five months later, with no plan or intent, Missa became pregnant again. It was a pregnancy on eggshells, fought together against hardhearted doctors, bleeding frights, and that question of what if, what if. Tatiana Annaliese was born in February of 2008. As with the previous pregnancy, my wife refused to entertain the idea of naming our child Reese’s Peanut Butter Cutlip.
Soon after Tatiana’s first birthday I deployed for six months. I had spent large blocks of time away from my oldest daughter before, including a period during 1996 in which I was sent to Las Vegas and Italy, and moved my permanent base from Germany to Nebraska, necessitating my mother to keep her for nearly eight months. Besides missing my kid, it didn’t worry me. It did now. Tatiana would experience so much I would not witness, and there was so much I could not protect her from. I hadn’t thought about that when I was twenty-six.
But, in the morning, after I walked from work under the sharp Qatari sun, I would sleep and dream that Tatiana in her crib on a previous day was being watched by Dane. Monsters in the closet would stay away, because he would not let them by. In my dream he was an adult. I could never see his face, but I could see his sharp blue eyes, his mother’s eyes, and I knew that he would be there for Tatiana in a way I was never able to be for him.
My wife Missa is a nurse. As is my mother, my sister, my grandmother, an assortment of aunts. I don’t like hospitals myself. Walking down the hallways of one, I felt like the soundtrack of a horror movie was playing a drunken symphony of whooshes, beeps, and whispers, and that I was an actor in that movie. I know death was behind every door, and I still went through them, ignoring the audience’s catcalls. This hospital was no different. Only upon reflection do all the clues click to me. The pause in the nurse’s speech after she first tried to get the heartbeat. The change in rooms to perform an ultrasound. Her need to get the doctor, leaving us behind to stare at a screen of silent static. The doctor passed his decree through a mixture of goop and stillness, then floated to other rooms.
The doctor suggested a dilation and curettage. Missa had seen one during her nursing clinicals and resisted the idea. There were other approaches considered safer, but this was a military hospital and was several steps behind those in the civilian world. Missa talked to the nurse on the phone and was told the doctor would prescribe Misoprostol, often used for ulcer prevention, but also for inducing labor or abortion. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Misoprostol can be self-administered. My wife did not foresee any problem with doing this at home. The only thing I needed to do, she said, was to insert the Misoprostol, as it would be difficult for her to do. She put a dark towel on the bed and a white disposable pad on top of it. She lay on top of them The pills were tiny, no bigger than the allergy pills I often forget to take. I lubricated two of my fingers and inserted the pills with a fishhook motion, like a wrestler cheating out of the referee’s view.
“What now?” I asked.
“We wait.”
I stood silently, listening to San Antonio snow whisper goodbye like a Dali clock off the roof. Missa explained the process could take a while, so I should find something to occupy myself. I asked her if she wanted anything--perhaps some cake from my stepdaughter’s birthday the previous day. Celebrating had been muted, so there was plenty of cake remaining. Missa passed on the offer. I went into the living room and powered on the Playstation. Beating somebody up sounded good to me.
I performed my medical procedure at ten minutes to three in the afternoon. The rejection of a nearly three-month-old fetus is a muted and mocking form of labor, like hearing a favorite song played by untalented and bored children. Instead of doctors and nurses, there is only a hapless husband, taking sabbaticals from smashing people in the head with a metal chair to see if there is any help he can provide. There was not. There was no room of eager relatives looking up at every swoosh of the door; there were only empty chairs and a telephone to be ignored. This empty labor lasted five hours and at the end, there was no crying from a stretching baby covered in blood and what appeared to be congealed bacon grease. There was only a tiny pinkish creature, some cross between a tadpole and a Spielbergian alien.
My wife called me into the room, and I saw the small blob, a bullseye on the dark blue of the towel and the whiteness of the pad. There was surprisingly little blood. I looked at the small form. It was barely half the length of my thumb. A fetus at eleven weeks has formed some recognizable features--it was recognizable as human, but it appeared to be a human drawn by a talented toddler. The arms and legs were discernible, but there was a tone to them that I could only think of as tabula rasa. Those arms would not freckle. The mouth was a tiny line, as if at the last second someone thought to draw a smile on its features. The eyes were drops of blue ballpoint pen stains. The gender was indistinguishable, but my wife insisted it was a boy. His name was Dane Xavier.
We had a baby blanket we were never going to use. Missa cut a small section out of it and put the fetus on one side of it, folded it over, and folded it over again. She put the blanket into a sandwich bag. I watched my wife perform all this with cool efficiency. She worked in a hospice and often caught a final breath. Before Dane, I had seen one dead person in a casket.
We discussed what to do. Missa wanted to cremate. I wasn’t positive, but I couldn’t think of what else to do--flush it down the toilet, bury it in the backyard. There seemed no good solution. It was late at night, and we had to wait to go to the funeral home, so the fetus went into the closet with shoes, shirts, pants, and boxes of papered history. Missa said there wouldn’t be any issue with decomposition, which was beneficial as our daughters didn’t have to see the sandwich bag in the freezer. We put the bag on a high shelf the dog couldn’t reach.
The person we talked to at the funeral home said it would cost fifty dollars for cremation. I wrote the check, and Missa took the bag out of her purse like a packed lunch. A few days later we were given an urn the size of a closed fist. It was put on our dresser, next to a box my wife had put together, like a time capsule, with baby socks, sonograms, the pregnancy test. This is your life for the pre-birth crowd. The check was never cashed.
The average temperature for cremation is between 1600 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes approximately two to three hours to cremate a human body. A person who weighed 150 pounds would be completely cremated at roughly the rate of a pound a minute. It would only take a second or two for Dane.
How do you mourn what never was? The collected ashes on my dresser are a person with whom I never interacted, never shared a pizza, never tossed a ball. He would never come hesitantly from school, stuttering to explain a bad grade or a black eye. He would never experience a first kiss. There would be no bones to break, no casts to sign. He was a world of not, a life of never.
We held our own memorial service and moved on. The world asks how everything is, and you say fine. Never mind waking up at three in the morning to a wife’s sobbing and the comfort that can not be provided.
Life is a highway, notable automobile spokesman Tom Cochrane told us, and we drove on. One passenger gets dropped off, and another gets picked up. Five months later, with no plan or intent, Missa became pregnant again. It was a pregnancy on eggshells, fought together against hardhearted doctors, bleeding frights, and that question of what if, what if. Tatiana Annaliese was born in February of 2008. As with the previous pregnancy, my wife refused to entertain the idea of naming our child Reese’s Peanut Butter Cutlip.
Soon after Tatiana’s first birthday I deployed for six months. I had spent large blocks of time away from my oldest daughter before, including a period during 1996 in which I was sent to Las Vegas and Italy, and moved my permanent base from Germany to Nebraska, necessitating my mother to keep her for nearly eight months. Besides missing my kid, it didn’t worry me. It did now. Tatiana would experience so much I would not witness, and there was so much I could not protect her from. I hadn’t thought about that when I was twenty-six.
But, in the morning, after I walked from work under the sharp Qatari sun, I would sleep and dream that Tatiana in her crib on a previous day was being watched by Dane. Monsters in the closet would stay away, because he would not let them by. In my dream he was an adult. I could never see his face, but I could see his sharp blue eyes, his mother’s eyes, and I knew that he would be there for Tatiana in a way I was never able to be for him.
