A mother without child

Sometimes it does feel as if the pregnancy did not actually happen, as if the whole ordeal was simply a disturbing, vivid dream or the product of my own imagination. I could be the protagonist of a science fiction thriller, my identity stolen, the last year of my life erased by mysterious evil forces. I can remember nine months of pregnancy, but other than some medical bills and excess weight, there is no real evidence of it. Sometimes, for a second, I think I'm still pregnant and just haven't had my baby yet.

Sometimes, however, my whole body will just ache for my son, a ravenous craving. I find myself at these times taking huge, deep breaths, as if I could catch a whiff of his essence in the air. I know what my husband smells like. I know the comfort of being able to summon a memory or a place, or the spirit of someone, through the power of a familiar scent. I hold the blanket and knit cap my son was wrapped in at the hospital up to my face and I inhale until my lungs are bursting; but these remnants of my baby are eerily odorless, not the faintest trace of olfactory evidence remains. Everything else in the world has a smell, or at least a scent that evokes presence, but my son did not leave one behind. I cannot even have that simple connection with him.

I sometimes see myself as a freak, the pathetic subject of a nature documentary, the slow, sad female of the species who, tricked by a cruel twist of biology into believing she has reproduced, spends her life roaming her habitat in search of her phantom offspring.

My son was born at 1 o'clock in the morning, an induced labor fast and painless under heavy dosages of epidural medication. My husband and I named him Luke Michael. We were able to hold him and kiss him and baptize him and keep him with us for hours after his birth.

They were agonizing hours, filled with fantasies that Luke's eyes would open, and punctuated by a horrible sound that I later realized was our wretched, unhinged wailing. But Luke was beautiful and he was ours; there was still a joy in holding him, still a thrill in seeing him for the first time.

I spent the next days, even the next week, trying to celebrate Luke's birth while simultaneously mourning his death. I could not stop myself from brimming with the pride of a new mother. It was a part of me that could not be kept down. Hours after I held him in my arms for the first time, I showed off my son, taking extreme advantage of a hospital policy that allowed families unlimited access to their dead newborns. Luke was held by his grandparents and aunts, passed around my hospital room in a ritual that seemed perfectly sound to me at the time, but that probably permanently traumatized my ambushed relatives. They saw his long legs, his giant feet that had jabbed my ribs, his full head of red-brown hair (light like mine, not dark and thick like his father's).

My husband and I have photographs of ourselves holding Luke; we have his lanky footprints and a lock of his hair. I sent clothes to the funeral parlor -- a diaper, an undershirt and the special homecoming outfit I had chosen for him -- to make sure he was dressed properly when he was buried. We honored him with a formal funeral, and laid him to rest in a small white casket covered in downy feathers like angel wings. I tried to be as much of a mother to my son as I had the chance to be.

But all we really have of Luke is this suffocating sadness. The hospital professionals -- the counselors and nurses and clergy -- tell us that we did know our baby, that we do have memories of him, but it's just not true. As time has passed, Luke has become more real to us, more of a presence in our lives, but what we have bonded with is the sadness, the emptiness that, like a growing child, keeps taking up more and more space in our lives. All we have to remember Luke is sadness, so we cling to it so as not to abandon our son.

We are not so selfish or self-absorbed not to know that our pain is barely a blip on the meter of world suffering and tragedy. But our small world revolves around our missing baby. Even as I struggle with the sadness that the loss of my son has unleashed in my life, I am comforted by the way my grief returns with faithful potency every time I fear I may be forgetting. It is the gaping hole in my life, where my baby and I were supposed to be together, that reminds me that I am still very much his mother. Whatever I fear now, it is not that my grief will never heal. My greatest fear is that it will.

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