Birth Day

Goodnight, my angel
Time to close your eyes
And save these questions for another day
I think I know what you've been asking me
I think you know what I've been trying to say
I promised I would never leave you
And you should always know
Wherever you may go
No matter where you are
I never will be far away

Billy Joel, "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)"

To this day we have our own family mythology, our collection of stories about the day my youngest brother was born, and we rehearse them, almost ritually, in our circle around his flat headstone.

There's the one about Mom fainting in the shower while Dad got us all up for school. He told me to get the littlest kids ready for the day, if I could, because they were going to a friend's house while he took Mom to the hospital. He said Mom wasn't feeling so great, and I got up and dressed the babies and went through my day as happy as they say larks are, because I knew what it meant when mothers felt sick at the end of their pregnancies and the kids had to go to a neighbor's house. I was almost twelve and had been through this three times before, that I could remember. I told all my classmates at school that by the end of the day, I would have a new brother or sister. I didn't hear about the fainting until long afterward, though. Fainting wasn't quite right.

Then there's the one about Brina, my little sister, who got her hand bitten by a dog that day, at a friend's house, and went to the hospital (no stitches, if I remember correctly) and got to see Mom before any of the rest of us. That's the funny part, such a random accident.

Foremost in my memories is when Dad told us that we had a little brother, Thomas John, who had been stillborn. The placenta had separated, and Mom lost a lot of blood and was still in danger. I didn't understand all the words, but I knew the important ones. I didn't sleep well that night. I remember the radio was on, turned down softly for comfort, but it seemed to me that it kept playing the same song repeatedly, because I kept hearing the same descending chord progression over and over again until it became a grim, horrible organ accompaniment to my frustrated attempts to sleep and to know what was going on, whether my mother was alive or dead.

I heard many other stories later. How Mom said she hadn't been given a choice between the peace of heaven or a return to her family, but she would have chosen to live anyway, because she knew we needed her. How the first thing Mom wanted to know when she woke up from the emergency c-section was how her baby was. Since she had a tube down her throat and couldn't talk, she signed the letters for "baby" to a friend who was there with her, who knew sign language because his son was going deaf. How the midwife, carrying my baby brother to Mom for a last goodbye, sensed something of his spirit remaining in him that wasn't there when she carried him away again, like Thomas John wanted to say goodbye too.

Mom stayed in the hospital until she could breathe in hard enough through a tube to make two little balls float up high in this toy-like contraption the nurses gave her. She was cheerful and had us all try it out. When we all went home again, Grandma was there, flowers stood in vases on the table and around the house, and people came every day with dinner and words of comfort. Our neighbor down the street, a friendly man whose daughter was our playmate, came and talked to Dad about what had happened. "That must be hell," he said feelingly. I was slightly shocked, since "hell" was not a word we used in our house, but I said nothing, and Dad, who took a long time to believe that Mom was really going to be alright, simply nodded.

I remember flipping angrily through the book we had about babies to find the chapter on how sometimes things went wrong and the baby died, feeling betrayed when there wasn't one. And then for a long time I felt rather bitter when I saw moms at church with their perfectly healthy, perfectly alive babies. I know Mom's pain was more acute than mine. But long before Thomas John came and left this world, I knew where people went when they died, and I knew when I helped carry his tiny blue coffin to his graveside that I was merely escorting his physical body to its resting place; his spirit had returned to the place of ancestors and those yet born, to wait a while longer to be reunited with us. We're an eternal family, and death is only a temporary separation. Even if it didn't take away all the pain, knowing that was a primary source of comfort and strength.

We tell these stories to each other each time we stand in the cemetery together next to Thomas John's little grave, and as the years have passed, the stories blend together and each story is part of our own memory, and now visiting the cemetery is part of it too, with tales about the little angel statue that used to guard Babyland but was taken down (we think) for fear of vandals, the planes zooming down over our heads toward the little airfield that used to be right beside the cemetery, and most of all, the other little graves around Thomas, each one for a precious baby. We think about them, brushing the dirt off their headstones too and picking up flowers or balloons that have fallen over. We think about their families, hoping that they're doing well and that they know they'll see their little ones again. We feel sad sometimes, remembering how sad we were to lose Thomas, but what else can we be but grateful when Mom is still here with us and when we know we'll see our brother again someday? We know each year that we visit, as we get taller, older, and wiser, that we're part of a story that will never end.