Porcelain Dolls
It was me who brought the second twin to the mom, so that both were cradled warmly against her chest. Her husband joined her at the head of the bed, embracing her as they nuzzled and cooed and cried over their newborn son and daughter. With great tenderness, the experienced labor and delivery nurse placed little cotton beanies on each, then stepped back.
Meantime the attending obstetrician and I huddled at the foot of the bed, whispering as we completed all the usual steps. We delivered the placenta and assessed the perineum; applied the thick pad and stretchy hospital undergarments; then maneuvered the stirrups down and the bottom of the bed up.
As minutes ticked by, we were all keenly aware of the infants’ soft little movements, which slowed, and then ceased.
The mother wailed and the father seemed unsure what to do. I glanced at the attending, who looked to the nurse, who stepped to one side of the bed, with a nod to me towards the other. And so I found myself trying to figure out how best to separate a dead baby from his grieving parents.
I don’t recall what I said or did but I’m sure I was awkward. I do remember how impossibly light he was, how pale and still. I had just witnessed him emerge into this world, his translucent skin flushed and pulsing with life, mouth opening and closing as if in surprise, arms waving and legs kicking as if fighting.
I placed him in the hospital bassinet and watched as the nurse cleaned and swaddled them both. She turned to the parents: “Would you like more time?” she asked.
The father turned to the mother. Her face grim, she shook her head no. The nurse nodded, and we left.
The rest of the shift was probably the usual exhausting cadence of waiting and boredom, punctuated by urgency and panic. My panic. I was merely surviving, and there wasn’t a time nor a place to process things like 18 week premature babies dying before your eyes.
But later, it may have been the following day, I was tasked with an unusual errand.
In the morgue, it was easy to identify their little bodies. Bringing them back up to the floor as we were doing was outside of standard operating procedure, requiring verified explanations and the signature of an M.D. from the team. And this is how I found myself alongside the orderly who was pushing the covered bassinet up through the hospital.
Most of the people we encountered, including staff, paid little attention. But a few stepped to the side and waited respectfully as we passed, as if we were a miniature funeral procession. Which, for all intents and purposes, we were.
When we got to the floor, the nurses waved us into a side room. What we needed to do could not happen in the nursery, alongside all of that new life, those breathing babies. I don’t know if it was the rules, or just understood.
One nurse had two very small newborn sleeper gowns, white and frilly. Another helped her, and I popped in and out. When everything was just so, we wheeled the bassinet into the room where the family was gathered.
I did not go in. But I remember those two beautiful babies like porcelain dolls, and the mother’s arms outstretched, ready to receive them, one last time.
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I’m not exactly sure why this case came to mind this morning, well over 20 years later, as I walked the dog around our neighborhood pond. I hypothesize that it’s because it’s Christmas Eve. All around town, churches have nativity scenes out front (mostly protected by plexiglass, sadly) and tonight is the night that all those straw-filled wooden cradles will receive a baby Christ figurine. My family in Guatemala had an elaborate indoor nativity (in Latin America, it’s a bit of a neighborly one-up, to have the best ‘nacimiento navideño’ around) and the exquisitely carved baby Christ wore an entirely handmade, frilly white dresslike outfit. I don’t need to explain why that might jog my memory of this incident, and perhaps also why I felt compelled to write it all down, just like this, all in one go.
If I needed to craft a message underlying this story, I’d say, it’s similar to many of the other stories from training that I’ve shared: It’s a long overdue reflection. Because at no time during or after this event occurred was it discussed. No one asked me how I was coping with this or any of the other incredibly tragic cases I was involved in. So there’s that, the healing component, of just getting it out there, admitting that this happened the way that it did, for better or for worse. The next step is to go deeper into it, and think, if I had been able to process this at the time in some kind of normal, healthy way, what would that have looked like? And that may have involved a discussion around how to manage the dichotomy of life and death, celebration and suffering, elation and grieving. It’s a difficult balance, one that requires constantly emotionally shifting gears. It’s hard, and maybe we all managed to figure it out without support or guidance, more or less.
And yet, here I am, writing it all down, decades later.
