In a certain sense we all start dying as soon as we are born, but with the birth of our son, Errol Milner Clifford, death came to take him immediately.
The first sound a healthy newborn makes is a loud cry. From the moment of his delivery we waited for this sharp wail of life. It did not come. The midwife patted his back to force the cry. It did not come. The nurse suctioned his lungs. It did not come. The midwife gave him oxygen. The cry did not come.
Through our tears of joy and exhaustion and excitement we realized that something was wrong with our child. He would not cry. Something was keeping him from this world. Something was terribly wrong.
This was not the arrival we had anticipated. Nothing is guaranteed in life, but we had assumed that the prenatal yoga, vitamins, sobriety, child birthing classes, and good humor we kept would protect us from danger, fear, death, this.
After the heat lamp failed to increase his pulse rate and after the oxygen mask was unable to sustain his breathing we rushed to the hospital ten minutes away. Errol was fading from the new life he had just begun.
1 comment:
Dear Jonathan,
The fact is that there are no guarantees. We hold on to our good habits and good karma and believe that good will come. And it does. But sometimes it comes in a different package than we thought we would get, different timing, just different. Rabbi Harold Kusher who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People wrote something that has stuck with me. And that is sometimes chaos happens. Sometimes things happen for no damn good reason. (His son had Progeria, an aging disease of the young.)
Makes sense to me.
Like Errol, if we can only live in the moment - being thankful for what is right in front of us to be thankful for.
Marigene
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