And for the truly brave......

Day One

There were no screams. His mother bit her lip until the blood was flowing but she did not scream. She was a tall and humble woman, and as the membranes broke she pushed him into the world gently, with much love, like you would push a child across the classroom door on his first day of school.

And so he came into the world without much fanfare at dusk, on an unmemorable autumn day. No wind outside, no thunderous rain, no bright sun shining, no major headlines on the news, just a mundane and rather grey blanket of shapeless clouds.

They say the obstetrician lost composure when she pulled him out to realise the chord was knotted halfway through its length. She talked about a death sentence in waiting and a miraculous escape.

His father was a humble and shy man, wounded by things much greater than he ever was, who held his wife’s hand tight with glossy eyes, while feeling out of place as he saw his son come into the world.

Those last few days, just before he was born, the handles of the clock had turned erratically, faster at times, slower at others. They jumped from line to line as in a game of leapfrog, disorderly, collapsing over every minute in less than ordinary fashion. And as disorderly as the handles of the clock was the wealth of masks, pipes, sensor, cold medical paraphernalia and crowds of lights and blankets, white coats and faces, all attentive and all courteous. All clinically concerned.

Momentous tears and screams always accompany moments of anguish and pain. They are man’s expression of rage against a distant god that cannot hear the whispers floating between lovers. But composure is often the manifestation of suffering so deep that it finds no outlet. Real tragedy is orderly and quiet. And so his mother listened, attentively and understood the words, each one of them as a separate set of well distinguished sounds. She heard the words, all of them kept repeating in her mind in constant loop: “syndrome”, “hypoplastic”, “heart”, “left”. But like the words of a language unknown to her they made no sense. They made no sense because stopping a mother from holding a new-born child cannot make sense to a mother. They made no sense because deprived of proximity and love the word mother made no sense, they made no sense because, removed the mother, the word child had no meaning anymore.

That first night was a long night of tiredness and reddened eyes. His father was composed but somewhat distant. Like every man he felt the duties of a man bearing upon him: to be strong, to be lucid, to offer support and comfort to the people around him. And it was not the first time that he had found himself cast in that unseemly role, a weak and gentle man carrying the weight of life upon his shoulders, and trying to shelter others from the storm with the unseemly cover of his own body. That night he told his wife that he was in good care, that she need not worry, that everything that could be done was being done. That she should be strong and show no fear, that fear and grief destroy, but produce nothing. That they should think of their other beautiful child, who was alone right now, and who would need, somehow, to understand.

Day Two

His father got home late, and walked through the door with muffled steps, until he reached the kitchen door. He stayed away from light switches and windows and enjoyed the darkness for a while, the world in black and white, for a moment much easier to read than the real one in full blast colours. He reached out for a glass and poured some water in it, than sat down. He was tired and brought the glass up to his dry, chapped lips with the last ounce of energy that he could master. He drank avidly, and as he did, tears started choking him, and flowing on his face, as water flowed out of the glass onto his neck and shirt. After he put the glass down, he leaned back his head cast back slightly, and cried quietly until he heard a noise upstairs.

The baby sitter had walked out soundlessly, no words spoken, just as he slipped through the door a few minutes earlier. The sound could only come from up the stairs – his daughter was awake. He wiped the tears off his face and managed with great strain to stand up. In the darkness he saw his own reflection in the window, anything but the composed and sober fatherly figure he’d always aspired to be. He straightened his shirt, run his hand through his hair, blinked once or twice, than like a fully loaded lorry, with great strain, he moved towards the door.

As he approached the staircase, at the top of the first flight of steps, he saw a little girl of five or six standing still in her pyjama. That was his daughter. She looked at him with eyes full of sleep and spoke no words. She was skinny, with long hair covering some of the features of her long face. She was not worried, or strained, or panicked. She was just there, a sleepy child waiting to be comforted.

He climbed up the stairs two steps at a time and grabbed her in his arms and as he held her tight, he climbed the remaining steps leading to her bedroom. He lay her on the bed and lay next to her, curled up in a bed clearly too small for his size. The little girl lay there, now half awake, between his mass and the radiator, still. She asked how her mother was. “she is OK. Your brother is a bit sick, though.”

They fell asleep without another word, father and daughter next to one another. The girl kicked him in the night, for many times. It had annoyed him in the past, but that night he enjoyed it, even treasured it, like he did every moment in that small bed.

He woke up in the morning, smelling his daughter’s hair. It was a smell that he knew well, but it overwhelmed him on that sunny day to see her hair glittering in the rising sunlight. They ate breakfast sitting next to one another. He normally enjoyed looking at his daughter finishing her cornflakes bowl, with eyes half opened quietly, but somehow he found the quiet that morning daunting. He told her they’d go off to see her brother in the afternoon.

On his way to the bathroom he stopped for a second to look at the stack of clothes, still in their plastic wrappings, that him and his wife had spent so many weeks in choosing. Winny the Pooh, winked at him from a Pyjama top. Winny the Pooh was always ugly he thought quietly, and today that look of naïve stupidity infuriated him.

As the water started running cold down his chest, he resolved he would go past the office that morning. His job was tedious just like his colleagues, the office tower in which he worked, the morning journey full of grey faces, the long and repetitive days. It was a day, however, on which he felt a need to see the world was still afloat, with its grey faces, people running, women stressed, children screaming, cars driving by, buses beeping, colleagues yawning, his boss pretending to be important. The illusion of purpose helped him in some way to push the door open that morning, even though it felt so heavy.

Some types of grievance do not show on faces, and some men, made stern by their own nature or by the accidents of life, are less prone than others at showing their emotions. He did not spend long in the office that day, an interminable half an hour of unconcerned and unaware faces that stared at him without much purpose, deprived of all desires. Leaving the office, he walked alone for miles across crowded streets, his sense of discomfort growing with every tired step. He tried to keep his thoughts at bay and focus, but they kept leaping back at him, forcing themselves into his mind with every breath and every heartbeat.

He wondered, in total silence, what if anything could be fair in this whole affair and as he realised no answer was forthcoming he concluded that no explanation could be given. Eventually, he found himself staring at the bronze doors with a mixture of provincial fear and hate. He was a man grown up in hardship who had learnt to expect little of other people and even less of those he could not see. And yet that morning he walked in, his step forced by the notion that falling to one’s knees is the last resort of any man and that there’s no shame in it. He prayed with fervour unbecoming to the truly faithful, totally devoid of habit and contrition. Unlike many others overwhelmed by unintelligible cruelty, he did not beg for explanations but genuinely pleaded for deliverance.

That day his mother felt drained and panicked and confused. She tried within the confines of that room to imagine something different, but alone with thoughts of what confronted her, she was unable to make sense of any of it. She longed to see her husband. She longed for him to do the only thing she knew was well beyond his powers, to take her far, far away from those four walls, to a place of peace and quiet and tranquillity.

As she struggled up from the bed and to the bathroom, she spent long minutes staring at her reflection in the mirror. She was not beautiful, with the same long face her daughter had taken from her, she had nice eyes of a deep blue colour and full lips, her forehead was broad and her skin still soft. And she was still quite young, with fresh memories of the shy glances that male colleagues would cast at her in spring, when pastel coloured dresses re-emerged from her wardrobe.

Her eyes were bulging from a sleepless night and she would have wanted to touch up her make-up for no purpose but to hide behind it. But in that bare, functional bathroom she had taken little, no makeup, no pincers, no nail filer, just some shower gel, a toothbrush, a comb and some perfume, which she received at Christmas months before, but never wore.

They told her it would be another hour until she would be allowed to climb up to the neonatal ward, and having exchanged a hospital gown for an old pyjama she went back to lie in bed. She leafed through a magazine that she had purchased days before, to look at during the long hours in that room, before regaining strength to move around and go about her daily life as normal. The pages fluttered in the draft coming through the open window and as they did she caught a glimpse of refined homes and carpets and lamps and fireplaces and proud parents standing on the thresholds of country villas, their smiling children right beside them. She got little pleasure from looking at the ordinary dreams that had generated a somewhat muted sense of envy in her until two days before. And after a few moments, she put the magazine away to look out of the window into an inside courtyard, which was the only thing besides high, concrete walls, that she could see if she looked out. The sun was shining, and the tiny triangle of sky was blue and occasionally crossed by small white clouds. It must be windy outside, she thought to herself.

Her husband and the girl arrived in the early afternoon, just after the doctor had quickly shied away from her room after delivering more bad news. They walked in unexpectedly and it was only after they came through the door that she realised the muffled laughter down the corridor must have come from her daughter. As she heard the hinges of the door creak, she was awoken from the dream that seemed to have taken hold of her, even though she was well awake. Her daughter barged in with as much energy as a puppy, eager to see her mother after a separation, that to her must have seemed long.

She saw her daughter approaching her bed as in slow motion, waving her hands, with a big smile and felt uncomfortable at so much exuberance imprisoned in such a tiny room. The little girl was quite amused by her mother’s presence for a while, but soon she grew impatient with little of interest to amuse her in a rather plain hospital room. She asked about her brother in a rather disinterested fashion, clearly unable to imagine someone she had not seen, or touched or heard before. To her he was a distant, remote and abstract concept that would maybe gain some meaning in time, but which was nothing more than an amusing thought at that point, much like the stories of the amusement park her father promised to take her to one day.

Impatience was becoming palpable when the nurse came in to announce that they could go upstairs to see him. His father wondered whether it was worth to turn a fantasy into a real memory for a little girl that age, but then remembered he’d been told some time ago that the best policy was to be transparent and explain and to help children understand what happens in the world around them. And to comfort them and let them know that they’re not to be blamed for any of it, that life will take its course no matter what, that outcomes are neither good or bad or right or wrong, they just are, like all of us, there for a certain period, until time wipes out any memory of them and until those who remember them leave this world taking with them any trace of their passage.

He was alone in a room that could host more than just one child. Next to the window he lay there in glass cage, too fragile to be allowed out. The buzzing sound of respirators and medical paraphernalia of all sorts conferred the room an intimidating feel that did not go unnoticed by the little girl. For a while she clung to her dad and walked around quietly, looking at her hands, so clean and humid after she was forced to wash them.

Her father held her up in his arms so she could take a look at her brother. She could see his hands, his feet but little else. She was quite troubled by the bluish colour of his skin and curious of why he had to stay in a glass case. However, her discomfort was short lived and, after a short while, she struggled from her father’s arms to tiptoe to the window and look outside.

Her parents looked at her with a mixture of joy and overwhelming sadness at the thought she could not understand what was going on. Her mother passed a hand over her cut lip and felt her eyes getting moist as she watched her daughter ask what all the cables were there for. They had intended to explain what was going on. But neither of them could find the strength to explain what they themselves could make no sense of. And so they stood there looking at the girl with forced smiles every time she turned their glance at them, until the nurse said it was time for them to head back downstairs. The doctor was about to start his round. Again.

Day Three

Black marks had appeared under his father’s eyes, unshaven he had spent the night shivering on a chair. His mother’s mind was empty as she sat right besides him. Despite the misery of little sleep and the fatigue of childbirth, she looked beautiful that morning. Beautiful with her broken features like a Picasso, beautiful like every woman whose mask has unexpectedly come off.

There wasn’t much confusion or commotion, only a white gown, and a long tail of grey hair. She didn’t need to say, she did not need to talk. Much as there are no instructions needed for a first kiss, no footnotes were required in this case. They slowly stood and walked over to the glass box, to see themselves inside a case. So precious and so fragile a treasure that even air and cold could blow it all away ever so quickly.

He stood there, on an altar of pipes and blankets, breathing, slowly. The modern version of the sacrificial lamb. A crucifiction with no anticipated resurrection. They looked at him for one last time, unsure for the first time, of what exactly they were looking at. And finally, with great regret and inconsiderate relief they said good-bye. Not to the boy they never knew, but to the dream of the child they had imagined for years.

And so he fell asleep, the blissful sleep that only children know. And as he left this world, too young to leave a mark of his passage across the sand, his parents cried the simple tears of simple people of even simpler means. They cried the tears accompanying the end of something that never was, so full of longing, wonder and regret.