I Had a Son

When asked if I have kids, I can finally say Yes, I did.

When people ask if I have any kids, I used to answer an emphatic no and quickly change the subject before I burst out crying. These days, after taking a deep breath with a lump in my throat, I often say, “Yes, but my son died.” 

Saying yes is the right thing to do. It acknowledges that my son Jarret lived on this planet for twenty-seven days. (Or almost eight months, according to those pro-lifers who believe life begins at conception, but that's even sadder.)  Saying “no” was an easy way out, but an answer that left me feeling guilty because it denied his existence. I already had enough guilt to last a lifetime. That answer didn’t allow me to grieve properly.

Now I’m ready to tell you what happened thirty years ago.

Jarret never left the hospital. He was the smallest “preemie” in intensive care at Children’s Hospital, a place where I had more or less lived during his lifetime. When I wasn’t with him, holding his minuscule hand in the incubator, I was at home at my wit’s end, sobbing my heart out and pumping milk. “Jarret is a fighter,” doctors and nurses constantly reassured me. Paul, my husband, kept telling me to stop worrying. I wanted to hit him. “He gained two ounces yesterday, he’s over the hump.” Did he really believe that? How I wanted to believe that I would carry Jarret out of that hospital one day. But my dark despair was constant.

Six months earlier, Paul and I were vacationing in Costa Rica, drinking and smoking. We even managed to find a few lines of something resembling cocaine from his friends down the road from our hotel. I figure it was cut with mannitol, a baby laxative: soon after I snorted a few lines, I was sitting on the toilet. And I figured mannitol because it was a familiar taste: I used to buy it from the local headshop and turned a tidy profit selling grams of coke to my pals. Paul’s Costa Rica friends also grew pot on their teak farm (the trees were a ruse), so we were high pretty much all the time.

I had no idea that I was pregnant because two “specialists” had told me that I would never conceive.  I almost died in 1987 when I was a chef at an exclusive fishing lodge on Langara Island, 20 miles south of Alaska, so remote (no roads) that the float plane sometimes left guests waiting a few days to get in or out if there was inclement weather. After spending two days in bed too sick to boil an egg, I got on the two-way radio and called my doctor, Grant Ayling. I described my symptoms, which he dismissed as the flu and advised me to stay in bed for a few days. If not for a gynecologist guest, I wouldn’t be telling this story. She took a quick look and said I had to get to the closest ER – immediately. Thank God we weren’t fogged in – within hours at the Prince Rupert hospital, the anesthesiologist, reeking of whisky, introduced himself. (He was on call in this hick town). Terrified that I wouldn’t wake up, I screamed at him, accused him of being drunk. I had major surgery in the middle of the night to remove a tumour the size of a grapefruit, and the next day I was jetted to Vancouver airport (the surgery didn’t go well), where a waiting helicopter took me to the roof of Women’s Hospital, where I spent a few weeks in ICU. During that time, I was told that the tumour had left me infertile. But I was lucky to be alive.

This is what I thought in Costa Rica after I’d missed three periods: there must be another tumour. Drinking temporarily blotted my concerns, but I could feel the swelling and my bathing suit was snug.  A few days after I came home, I checked into the clinic and had some tests – a “look see”.   Of course, I feared the worst. The doctor asked, just like the dentist before taking x-rays, if I could be pregnant. “Absolutely not”, I replied. This answer always saddened me.  They gave me a clean bill of health – no sign of tumour.

Renee, my sister-in-law, went to London Drugs with me and I bought two pregnancy test kits, at her insistence.  I thought it was futile. Back home I sat on the toilet seat, shaking in disbelief. Both pieces of litmus paper read code blue. Holy Mary Mother of God. I’m pregnant!   Fucking Hell, this was too good to be true – I wasn’t used to things going my way; it was like winning the lottery. Then the negative thoughts creeped in:  the cigarettes, booze, coke. The one abortion in my twenties followed by a stillbirth in my thirties. I was forty years old. Not good. If that wasn’t enough to send me off the deep end, what about the procedure I just had – similar to a D&C?

I was on an emotional roller coaster. After reality sunk in, I was ecstatic.  I wanted those smarmy specialists who told me I could never conceive to be the first to know that they were wrong and how they made the past twelve years of my life miserable, telling me I would never be a mother.

 Jarret was a preemie, but the doctors told me that he was going to be OK. Until he contracted a staph infection in his tiny lungs. I was home pumping milk when I took a deep breath and picked up the phone on the ninth or tenth ring. It was the call the hospital had told me to expect just a few hours ago. “How long will it take you to return?” the doctor asked. Right away. I don’t remember driving across town and I don’t remember phoning Paul but I must have - he got to the hospital soon after me but I had no one to help get me through this, least of all him.  I had to decide then and there, in a few hours, whether or not my son would live or die. It was up to me to take him off life support. The nurses removed his IV and monitors and I lifted him from the incubator to a private room off the ICU. As I held Jarret the priest christened him. I was able to hug him for 30 minutes. Then I wanted to die with him.

I’ll never know if my son would be alive if I’d taken care of myself. The day Dr. Ayling came to the house was the first time I got out of bed in days. He sat in a chair opposite me and we both cried. Was he crying because he neglected to read my medical history? He confessed; he blamed himself for not telling me to get a few stitches and stay in bed after the first trimester due to my incompetent cervix, which was diagnosed years ago. Was I also an incompetent mother?  It kills me to think Jarret could be alive today if only…

The guilt covered me like a dark shroud, suffocating. I couldn’t shake it off. The guilt of thinking again it could have been booze, drugs and cigarettes that ended his short life was almost unbearable. I sunk into a deep depression. I tried to make a deal with God, I would give up a limb, I would give up my life, to have him live. I don’t even believe in God. The physical pain was unbearable.

Paul wanted to sue the hospital and Grant Ayling for medical malpractice but I wanted no part of getting money for his death. We went to counselling where Paul vented anger and  stormee out of Dr. Strickling’s office. I sobbed uncontrollably. Bonnelle Strickling was a Jungian psychotherapist and I had taken her philosophy course in university.  One phrase she said resonated with me: “It can be depressing for people to hear it’s supposed to be easy to make yourself happy. It hasn’t been my experience that people can simply choose not to be negatively influenced by their past.”  Needless to say, we soon divorced. Paul would never understand how much pain I endured: shutting down and shutting him out was my escape route.

I pretty much self-medicated for the next decade, until I went to Japan on a press trip: I was a travel writer on assignment with the Vancouver Sun. The Zojoji Temple has a garden filled with hundreds of stone Jizo statues representing unborn children lost to miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths. Many of the statues were dressed up in red crocheted caps with toys scattered at their stone feet.  The air was perfumed with incense. A few women were there, praying and quietly crying. Perhaps these women had chosen a Jizo for their “figure of compassion” like Christians choose Jesus. Here, it was acceptable to grieve in a public place and not being alone was comforting. I wasn’t a Buddhist but I knelt with them and cried and felt a huge release. It was like Jarret telling me it was okay to let go.

What is the right answer when an acquaintance, or someone you just met, asks whether you have kids? Sometimes it depends on who is asking. Their usual reply is an awkward ‘sorry for your loss’ or sometimes people-- invariably women about my age-- ask what happened, but I won’t go into details. My friend, a mother of two, got me out of the house after Jarret died. She wouldn’t leave my bedroom until I got up, got dressed and went for a walk with her. She would have kneeled with me in the Japanese Garden of Unborn Children.  A clinical psychologist wrote that the majority of Western women who lose a baby-- early on like I did-- experience shame and self-blame and guilt, and they can develop mental health issues like a taboo that could last for months or forever.

Saying, “Yes, but he died,” still opens the wound that will never heal, but it’s like I’ve grown a callus over it, an emotional blister protecting a tender place. But calluses crack and the “light gets in” as Cohen said.  Now I find myself saying “yes” more often than “no”.