So vulnerable and so moving
Her little body in our hands
Although his spirit had flown,
His memory, eternally remains.
***
NATHANAEL CAME into the world ‘unborn alive’ according to her Birth Certificate. We arrived a little before 11 at night and, after bathing him, we couldn’t sleep until 3 in the morning. I got up at 6 a.m. to prepare us all for the Heartfelt photographer’s arrival at 7:30 a.m., with our entire family arriving at 8 a.m. We were so blessed that our entire close family, our parents and my daughters, made it through. All of our brothers visited us later. We moved rooms immediately after; to Ward 4 Room 7.
That night, October 31, we cried a little. My first opportunity to blurt out a preponderance of emotion coincided with the visit from the social worker. I couldn’t believe she came in and expected to see us when I was a mess, holding Nathanael, ‘having a moment’. He didn’t think about asking if he could speak to us. Apologizing if he seemed rude, I asked him to come back later. That night was a closed night for Sarah and me, with many tears shed. We took a few videos of ourselves on our experience with our little man, before he had to go back to freshen up. That night I slept on a folding bed.
We received a few visits on Saturday, November 1; Some sweet friends brought some worship songs and we played them, we cried, and we prayed. God touched us. The night was very similar to the previous one; We sat in silence and could not escape the reality that had now haunted us. There’s nothing like the dichotomy of having a baby that won’t keep you awake at night; a baby we wouldn’t hear from daycare; a baby who didn’t wake us up several times during the night.
The visits we had from the psychologist and the psychiatrist were polar opposites; both professionals, but the latter so humble and appropriately mute. God, thank you for Dr. Ray Binns. The psychologist couldn’t tell us more than we already knew; the resources it offered, like Pauline Boss’s work on grief, which is great, I’ve studied it for a long time and often written about it.
It was typical for us to have Nathanael with us for several hours in the morning and then have him all afternoon into the evening. We would embrace it. We dressed him several times.
At first I thought Sarah might get out of the hospital sooner, but it was fitting that she was not leaving on Monday the 3rd but on Tuesday the 4th; it had something like the sadness of the third day. It was wise to leave when we did. We met with the funeral director and our funeral home minister the afternoon Sarah got home.
We had planned to visit Nathanael in the Perinatal Pathology Room on Wednesday, but Sarah got worse walking 100 meters to the hospital. We missed our appointment because Sarah spent a few hours in the emergency department. So we visited him on Thursday morning. The funeral was on Friday.
When the funeral came, we had had access to Nathanael for 179 hours. We really enjoyed (if that’s the right word) all that time. We make the most of it and have no regrets.
God gave us so much in our experience of our son.
© 2014 SJ Wickham.