If you told me that my most precious memories would be those where I held my dead child, I wouldn’t have believed you. I couldn’t have believed you. For, if you told me that my firstborn son would die — like the cursed children of the Pharaoh’s Egypt — it would have felt inconceivable.
This is a thing like that: inconceivable until it happens. Inconceivable here means: a thought from which the mind recoils like a hand from flame. It also means: a thing too immense to be fully grasped. For one cannot picture a whole life lost in anything other than bits and pieces.
Still, once you find yourself cast out into the nothingness of the desert, you make manna of what can be found here. And so, those memories stand above all other memories for me like mountains above a plain. The transcendent joy that I felt at seeing Jules’ beauty, in the flesh, that is a joy that even death cannot steal from me.
Dead bodies are not much discussed. On films and television, they seem to appear mostly in comedies and crime procedurals. I myself had been with the dying, but never at the moment of their death. I had been in the presence of caskets and urns, but never had I gazed upon the dead. Indeed, the idea of an open casket funeral had always felt odd to me. Why does the family want to behold their dead? Do they not know that their animating force is gone?
Perhaps that’s why, when I went into the operating room, I asked, “Is it okay to look at him?” Rather than being a comfort, even (yes) a joy, I thought it might harm me.
Yet, once I saw Jules, being in his presence was immediately and wholly natural to me. When they laid him in my arms, I knew how to hold him. I knew shortly thereafter that I needed to wash him. There was no logic that led me there; it was a need like thirst. I’m sure I didn’t do a particularly good job of it. (How could I through shock and tears?) And yet I felt, urgently, the need to care for him, even in death.
And so too with Willa. Together we held Jules, we kissed his forehead, we told him that we loved him. Our pastor came and administered the commendation, a Lutheran rite giving the dead over to God. Willa and I said the words three times, but I still have not let him go.
One of the staff had mistakenly told us that we would need to return his body to the morgue after 24 hours. Thank God the maternity nurses who arrived at our request explained to us that we could keep him with us as long as we liked. They even had a special cooling blanket we wrapped him in, to slow death from taking its natural course upon his fragile body.
A social worker encouraged us to do things with Jules that we would do if he were alive. And so, we sang to him from our family songbook and read him three books from the immense library of baby books that was to be his.
This may sound odd to you, as it did to me. Is this not a kind of playacting? Perhaps. But much of what we do with children is playacting. Part of this is proleptic, but part is symbolic: we read to infants not just to teach them words, but as a demonstration of our love. With Jules, only symbols can remain.
Care for Jules’ bodily person and joy in his bodily presence found it’s natural inverse as well. When, in the end, we did say goodbye to Jules, it was painful. His being apart from us in the morgue was painful. His being cremated without us present was painful. Now, there is a pain in not being able to hold him at all, even in death.
A good deal of our experience with Jules’ body is specific to the nature of having a child who dies in or around childbirth.
Today in most of the US, caregivers encourage bereaved parents to spend time with their dead infants. This is a change from an earlier practice of denying the mother and family the chance to see the child.
Curious to learn more, I have come across another Lewis, Emmanuel Lewis, a British physician and psychoanalyst who was an early proponent of this approach, in large part due to the experiences of unreality (he too, I have discovered, uses this word) faced by grieving parents.
“Memory facilitates the normal mourning processes essential for recovery,” Lewis and his collaborator Anne Page write. “With other bereavements there is much to remember… Not so with stillbirth.”
Lewis and Page go on to recommend that “mourning a stillbirth be managed by making the most of what is available and can be remembered. The aim is to fill the emptiness that impedes mourning.” They recommend specific actions such as encouraging parents to look at and hold their dead baby, encouraging them to name the child and hold a memorable funeral, and so on.
This is done not to encourage denial of the child’s death, but precisely the opposite. Mourning the dead child in the flesh, Lewis argues, enables the mourning process to begin. I might put it as follows: the physicality of these symbolic actions provides a bridge between an imagined world and the real one.
Clearly, Willa and I owe a great deal to Lewis and others in this field, as these memories of caring for Jules, even in death, have indeed become a touchstone of our grief.
Yet, is Lewis not simply recommending a return to an older and more venerable tradition that extends very broadly to caring for our fallen kin? Having experienced the death of a loved one, my former attitude to corpses seems precisely wrong. Whether an infant or spouse, a parent or a sibling, is it not natural to want to gaze lovingly upon their body? Is it not natural to want to care for them, somehow, even though they have died?
Despite my being a new convert to such ideas, surely it is. Even today, in many cultures there are practices of attending to the body and food offerings and libations are poured out for the dead. These practices stretch back many millennia.
When we visited Ireland, I was touched by the many stone tombs that dot the countryside. We visited the neolithic portal tomb at Poulnabrone, which was used for almost 600 years starting around 3,800 BCE. Some Irish tombs are older still. Newgrange was built in 5,200 BCE and is older than the pyramids.
The gospels too say, variously, that Jesus’ body was attended by Joseph and Nicodemus, and by his mother Mary, his companion Mary Magdalene, and Salome.
Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone revolves around the idea of caring for the dead. Indeed, King Creon’s decree prohibiting the burial of Polynices sets off a cycle of deadly grief that kills Antigone, then Creon’s son Haemon, and finally his wife Eurydice.
I think with some horror back to my own careless views about the dead. Today, if someone else I loved were to die — particularly if I was not present at their death, or if it was sudden — I would want to be able to say goodbye to them in the flesh.
And so, too, I think with horror at the death that Covid has brought us. We have no Creons today, only Mammons. In a society that cares so little for the living, it should be no surprise that we care so little for our dying and our dead. So many preventable deaths: we have let 900,000 die here in the US and 5.7 million around the globe, as the profit motive urges: “Onward! Let the dead bury the dead.”
How many were unable to say goodbye to their loved ones at the moment of their death? How many must be mourning them? And what of the unmourned? My mind has replayed, in recent weeks, those tragic aerial images of the mass burials of the Covid dead on Hart Island in New York.
The vexing question for me and the throngs of other mourners remains: can the dead feel our care?
Some see the matter in black and white, with ready yes and no. I have no such certainty, only woe and yearning.
Whatever one might believe, it is clear that the pain of death is, in part, the pain of separation. We cannot tell our loved ones of our love face to face. Maybe that is why our acts of care become so lavish in death.
Yet these acts of memory, no matter how ostentatious, will never substitute for the living embrace of love.
While there is something universal in grief, there are things unique to every love lost, to the manner of their death and the nature of the mourner. With each individual manifestation of grief come painful thoughts that can’t be shaken, like hooks in the heart.
For me, I am haunted by the thought that I never got to look my baby Jules in the eyes. That act, or so I imagine, contains the mutual recognition of one soul of the other, a communication of love beyond words. That moment was the moment for which I had been waiting. It was supposed to be the beginning of decades of caring looks and “I love yous.” And so, my loss is the loss of a child who died in the doorway to the world, before I could tell him of my love. Almost here, but not yet. Close enough to touch, but not to breathe our air. Perfectly formed in every way, but never to see our world.
No amount of memory, no amount of care in death can make up for that loss in life.
Even still, these writings that I make, these altars of words, they are my demonstrations of great love. They are my portal tombs and pyramids; they are what I have to give. They are meant to travel over waters, across space and across time, to find him, still alive in his mother’s womb.
I do not imagine he will feel them the way that you read them now. They can never make up for what has been lost. But I know the power of a symbol. And I know the power of the mind, which can hold a star and a mountain and many worlds — and so, too, a perished soul. So I send him my love in these words like the moon sends waves across the ocean to crest upon his far shore.
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Photo: I took this photo in 2019 of the neolithic-era tomb at Poulnabrone in Ireland on another very rainy day.