This is the silence that should fill my heart with joy despite exhaustion — the 3am buzz of the persistent fan humming through the air with a tiny human person lying across my chest, nuzzled in my neck in the perfect fit puzzle of mother and child.
I want the night and my mind to be quiet and simple. I want to listen to my baby’s breath as it speeds up and slows down in his dreams of milk and nightmares of not having any. His tiny limbs comforted by my aging ones, our breaths synchronizing together as one.
I try to forget for a minute or two the loss of my father and the guilt of all that went wrong in the last few months with his medical treatment. The questions of his mental soundness to make decisions on tests and procedures he did not remember taking or refusing. His quick downfall when we were all so focused on insurance approving one more week stay at rehab — the doctor at the hospital who said it is not the time to pursue palliative care. All the false hope of the medical system which was unrealistic and made him fight too hard and tax his heart when maybe had he went home and stayed in bed maybe he could have made it long enough to meet his grandson or longer. But then, what kind of life would that be? Did no medical professional know how bad of shape he was in? He wanted to get back home and he never did. He was alone and scared and confused in the end and I wish I could have been there but with a newborn I could not be — and even without one I would have had work and such and I likely wouldn’t have dropped everything to fly out when the doctors all said he was getting better, at least for the short term.
I mourn the loss of my father and I mourn the loss of these quiet peaceful moments with my first child that should be filled with such happiness but instead trap me in hours of what ifs even though it won’t change the outcome. I’m too tired to be as angry as I am. I’m trying hard to accept that my life is on its next chapter as a wife and mother — that all of us lose our parents at some point… some much younger than 67. And so the moments that will never be made of grandson and grandfather are a loss but the moments of 67 years can never be taken away and good and bad those memories are a gift, every last one of them.
I’ve always known this time would come but one can never be ready for it. I’m grateful to still have my mother who is in good health at 64, and look forward to the many memories we will create in the years to come — and for Dan’s parents who are already such a huge part of my son’s life. And I can imagine my father as grandpa in what would have been grilling hamburgers in the summer and reading books to my child in the winter and going to baseball games and playing catch to the best of his frail ability and judging me for my parenting choices that undoubtedly would be the wrong ones in his mind and I can imagine a whole lifetime of him being here with us to grow into a curmudgeon who loves spending time with his grandchild in between debating politics and rewatching his favorite dvds for the hundredth time.
But my son can’t imagine that and he never will know my father, not in the faintest memory. I can only try my best to bring love and happiness to his life and focus on spending time with the family we do have. Time goes by so fast and even now at 2.5 weeks old and a tiny 7lbs 11oz I see how much my son has grown. I’m still in disbelief that I’m a mother — that Ethan is my son. Yet I know in the way he knows me — in how he remembers being inside me for 9 months and is comforted by my holding him through the night as I sit wide awake in the darkness tormented by my thoughts, I find remarkable beauty in life — in this miracle of science that happens every day in the creation as much as it does in death. In the instincts of a newborn who is born not a helpless blob but a tiny person who already can communicate through baby sign language his hunger and request for a diaper change or burping.
So I find some peace in that. Some peace in seeing that the world is running on an engine that despite its flaws is working how it’s meant to work. That every life on its own means nothing and means everything. That we are indeed part of something bigger than we’ll ever know.
life with interest 