I haven’t posted anything in my blog for almost 8 months. I just couldn’t. There were too many arrangements to be made, too many efforts that failed; there has been too much emotion and heartache to work through on a personal level, so the idea of writing about it and then sharing it felt like a burden on top of a burden.
And as I’ve written before, even Atlas shrugged.
At one point, maybe it was after the frozen embryos didn’t thaw well while I was in India or when the first, second, and third surrogate didn’t get pregnant in India, my husband told me he didn’t want anyone to know. He didn’t want us to have to live our disappointment out loud anymore.
While I have taken on a vocal stance about our struggles with fertility, not just so others don’t feel so alone but also so that I don’t feel so alone, and while this blog has created a community that has brought us incredible support, and even offers from one woman to be our surrogate and another to donate her own eggs, I needed to take a reprieve from sharing here.
Further, while writing can sometimes be cathartic, other times it is too painful.
And finally, I need to publish this story as a book eventually, so have to divide what I do write between being on here and being in another form and forum.
But for now, I would like to return to that week of when I returned from India…..
Ironically, my father was dying exactly where I had been hospitalized with my incompetent cervix in 2009. He was in the same hospital where I had given birth, exactly. He was in the same hospital where there had been that NICU, dimly lit from the peripheral vision of my right, as I was led (first time on a gurney and second and final time in a wheel chair) to the NICU Room, that had brighter lights than at a Pink Floyd show, where I held my infant son for the first and only time – 4 years earlier.
The same fucking hospital. And on the anniversaries of my son’s birth and death.
Sure, I was now in the cancer ward instead of maternity wing. (Interesting that the words that seemed natural for me to use were ‘ward’ – which has a sense of doom to it – and ‘wing’ – which denotes a light and airy feeling.)
I had been wheeled in and out of that exact same hospital from a different entrance than the one where I was now walking in and out of every day, including the day I got back from traveling from India; that Thanksgiving, when I took a cab home after over 30 hours of travel time, grabbed a 5 minute shower, and then raced to the hospital.
The same hospital. Directly across the street from my OBGYN who had brought my baby into the world, who every time I drove to for my annual Pap Smear for the 3 years since Finley’s death I swore I would change doctors, as the entire surroundings of where I would park or where that deli was or where the door was to where I was wheeled in and 2 weeks later out were landmines of traumatic memories.
I was in the same hospital where I was carted out from the maternity ward on a rainy Monday, empty handed, save for some sympathy orchids that some best friends had sent me and some miscellaneous stuff that Craig had brought to the hospital to make what turned into my 2-week stay comfortable (comfortable being a loose term, obviously), and the precious keepsake book that had Finley’s picture, foot prints, and some literature about what bereaved parents like us should do.
Those days – the 3rd and 4th of December, were sacred days, meant for me to feel the emotional tumult that inevitably poured out every year. But this year I went to the hospital both days, what I know now was a true privilege, making sure the doctors never left the room before we had every answer they could give us; making sure my dad’s lips were not too crinkly from dehydration; playing him music; reciting him poems he’d written; holding his hands; praying.
The Friday after I got back from India my mom and sister and I were there, all 3 of us, together. As the two of them left, my dad motioned for me to stay, even though there were nurses in the room, waiting to check his pulses and change his pillows. This was unlike him; before this time, he would always interrupt any one of us in his family to learn what the staff needed to do; he seemed to respect their time, but something had shifted for him: perhaps he realized he had so little time left, and that it was indeed his to do with what he wanted.
“Do you have a name for your baby?” he asked me. His blue eyes that I’d inherited as bright as they’d ever been. “Yes,” I answered without a moment’s notice, “and one of them will start with an H.” (In the Jewish religion, babies are not named after the deceased, but usually the first letter of someone’s name is used as a tribute, so to speak. Finley, in fact, was named for my grandfather Felix. My dad’s name was Herbert.)
He smiled, as it was the exact answer he’d wanted. I told him our daughter’s name. And then I told him our son’s name. Those blue eyes and welled up and he smiled at me, with a gaze so strong I can visualize it now. He nodded. “That’s beautiful.”
I couldn’t bear to tell him that we weren’t pregnant yet. And further, that we hadn’t even been able to do the embryo transfer because our 2 embryos had thawed badly.
Two days later, that Sunday, now December 1st, he was having a rough day. They had wheeled him out of the hospital at the crack of dawn to go to Westwood UCLA, and then not been able to perform the procedure that they had planned to do, thus leaving the severe pain in his throat without any chance of relief.
He could no longer swallow and wasn’t allowed any fluids. He asked me that day to help him die. He looked at me with the intensity you’d find in some old detective movie, where people plot and plan in closed quarters; wearing hats; smoking cigarettes. “We’re smart. We can do this. We’ve got to get me out of here.” He remarked that in Oregon they have physician assisted dying. “But we’re not in Oregon,” I remarked sadly – feeling defeated that I couldn’t help him; crushed that the conversation had turned so drastic; so inevitable.
There were some pictures of my nieces, his granddaughters, next to his phone, that my sister had brought. “Do you want me to get some tape and put up these pictures?” I asked. “NO. NO, I don’t want to see their pictures. I don’t want to hear about India. I don’t want to hear about your baby.” Then he stopped himself from this rant and turned to me, with tears in his eyes, “but I want you to know that baby is so important to me. That baby is so important. Your baby is going to be so important to everyone.”
FUCK. Even as I type this I think of the look on his face, and how totally fucking awful it was to realize how much my dad already loved my future babies, his grandchildren, who he would never hold.
“Well you’re going to meet Finley when you go, you know.” I said. “I don’t believe in that,” he responded. “It doesn’t matter, Dad, because I know it to be true.”
We left it at that.
And then I returned December 2nd, and he was still lucid and he made funny jokes. That is the day they put him into hospice, the medical world’s way of throwing up their hands and saying there is nothing more to be done, but to make this man as “comfortable” as possible, as he dies.
So I was there that day. And the next, and the following. To make sure that he was comfortable. To bring treats or a thank you to the staff. To negotiate with the fucking idiotic hospice administrative lady who treated my father as if he was a file number in a fucking Amazon.com warehouse.
My eldest sister and I would trade shifts, often overlapping, always making sure we repeated every thing we’d heard to each other – perhaps thinking that in doing so we would solve this problem of our father dying – then to my mom, with one of us trying to keep our other sister in the loop.
All this without time to recover from jetlag, to honor Finley’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, and all of this with the devastating knowledge that I had no embryos left.
My father died, Friday, December 6th, 2013 – 4 years and 2 days after my own son had died, in the very same hospital.
I like to imagine that Finley’s soul returned to those same corridors, and led my father to peace.
And while it is now late July of the following year, and I have undergone 8 months of fertility related plotting, planning and failures, to get to the next step in our mission (which is imminent and gives me great hope), it seems like a good time to go back in time, so to speak, and pick up on December 3rd, 2009, the day that everything changed.
To be continued…