lacuna

A few days ago, I called the hospital and asked if they had pictures of the twins. I’m not really sure why. I’ve always been very clear that I didn’t want pictures, that I didn’t want the blankets they’d been wrapped in or the tiny clothes they’d worn. I can’t explain -- not even to myself -- what it was that I was looking for.

The nurse who answered the phone was very nice. She asked when the twins had been born and I told her that, while I didn’t know the exact date, it had been in October of last year. She asked if they had been admitted to the NICU and I said that one of them had been stillborn. As for the other twin, I told the nurse that I just wasn’t sure. I’d been under anesthesia, unconscious, for all four hours of her life, so I didn’t know whether they had tried to help her breathe and hooked her up to the NICU’s tubes and wires, or whether it had been obvious from the first that there was nothing to be done. “But the pictures,” I asked again, “Were there any pictures?” Of course, there were pictures, said the nurse. There were always pictures. And, she said, there would be a memory box, filled with everything that the twins had touched, with hand prints and footprints..

The nurse said that she’d let me know as soon as she found them , but it was a different nurse who called the next day. She asked me the same questions: When had the twins been born? Had they been admitted to the NICU? She asked me when I had been discharged from the hospital and how to spell my last name. “Maybe there aren’t any pictures,” I said and told her how, a month or so after the twins had been born, I had left a message asking the hospital to destroy everything. “Oh, no,” said the nurse, “We wouldn’t do that.”

The next morning, I got a call from someone who told me she was a social worker at the hospital. She said that she’d looked at all the records. She said that she’d looked at everything, that she’d looked very carefully, but that there were no pictures and no memory boxes. That there never had been any pictures or memory boxes. She said she was sorry. She said it was very unusual. She said that it wasn’t hospital policy. She said that it wasn’t the standard of care. And I told her that it was all right. Since I hadn’t been sure that I wanted them anyway, I was glad that it had happened to me and not to some other mother who might been foundered under the weight of this new, unlooked for, loss.

I didn’t think about it all that much until last night, when I read a post by Lori. To say it’s haunting really doesn’t do it justice. You’ll have to read it for yourself, but it describes a moment of grace that came to her just before the birth and death of her own twins. As I read the words on the screen, I felt the rise of a choking tide of jealousy. Why had I been cheated? Where was my grace, my sign of G-d’s presence? And then it occurred to me that perhaps I’d gotten my miracle after all. Maybe fate or chance or whoever takes care of these things had arranged for my twins to slip in and out of this world so quickly and so easily, that they’d left nothing tangible behind.