His middle name was Marley, named after a musical hero. He’d have been 5 years old this year. I don’t think there will ever be a year that I will forget his age. I don’t talk about him much anymore, but he’s still with me. He always will be. I don’t miss him like I used to, not with the excrutiating pain that used to live in every fiber of my being. Now I usually think of him with a wistful smile when I think of the boy he’d have been. I never knew him in the usual way. I never got to know the sound of his cry, or the smell of his breath, or the feel of his tiny fingers grasping one of mine with all the strength that he had. But I knew him by the flutter of his kicks and the movements on the ultrasound and the beat of his heart and the hopes and dreams I laid out for him as I rested my hand on my expanding belly that encased his delicate body. And I knew him by his dark hair and long fingers and lifeless body when they put him in my arms, gave me sad looks and left me alone to say goodbye to him.

His umbilical cord had cinched shut. It was as thin as a string, twisted up at the base against his belly. He should have been at least 5 pounds at that point. But he was 2 lbs, 13 oz. He had starved to death inside of me. I felt like my body had failed him, I had failed him. He was so tiny, like a doll. I kept expecting him to start moving at any time. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. I had the nurse take him away, only to regret giving him up for months after that. It killed me that I didn’t memorize his every feature, the feel of his skin, any lingering baby smell he may have developed. I don’t remember the color of his eyes, though my husband had said they were brown. I don’t fully remember if he looked more like his sister or his brother.

This kind of tragedy couldn’t happen to me. I had never known that someone this close to me could die. It seemed impossible that a baby could die. Sure, it happened in the news all the time, but I had never thought about the reality of it. Those seemed like stories. In real life women got pregnant and gave birth to healthy and wriggly babies, not a lifeless body. Yet here I was, holding the body of the baby who had been kicking at me only days before. It was then that he had said goodbye in a flurry of rapid kicks. It was the last time I had felt him when I thought back a couple days later as the nurse in the ER hooked me up to the ultrasound machine. He died on a Friday. I gave birth to him on a Monday.

I don’t think my eyes were really opened to life until I experienced death. My life is split up into chapters. Before my baby died. When my baby died. Merely existing through the pain of my baby’s death. Emerging from the death of my baby….. All the parts of my life are wrapped up into my chapters. There’s the innocence in the beginning, the naivety that bad things just don’t happen to good people. There’s the shock I felt as I was yanked from my safe cocoon to a world that is heartless and cold and dark. There’s the part where I was buried right there in the ground with my child, wondering if any part of me was actually alive on the living side, and doubting it. There’s the part where we mourned together before going our separate directions in our sorrow until finally going our separate directions altogether. And in the finale that is never fully final, there’s the part where life has a funny way of turning things around, allowing sprouts of green leaves to poke through the burned skeletons of the forest.

His middle name was Marley, he would have been 5 this year. He would have been in kindergarten. He may have been a budding soccer star or a whiz at cartwheels. He would have learned to read. This would have been the year I would have been able to take him to camp with his brother and sister for the first time. He may have been as tall as his older brother, older by only a year. He may have been independent like his sister or a natural cuddler like his brother. He may have sung in the shower, run barefoot in the grass, loved the color blue, preferred shorts to jeans, laughed with his head tilted back and his eyes to the sky.

I don’t miss him like I used to. He’s still with me. He always will be.

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