I can still remember the sound of Ellie trying to suck in air between fits of crying. The inward gasps were worse than the screams that echoed through the house, not because of any particular sound they made, but because I could feel the exhaustion in her lungs, in her flexing arms and legs and fingers and toes. I remember thinking that I was just as spent as she was and wished with selfish sympathy that she would stop for me. Stop for Dad. But she wouldn’t. She was six months old and, though it seems like a lie now or at very least a reckless memory, she had never stayed up to cry in her life. But she was sick then and
What to Expect the First Year pointed us to a general explanation: the flu. I was contented with the diagnosis but Brooke was not convinced. She held onto our baby with the same prayerful grace that she held onto her father with just before he died. I hovered around mother and child trying in an uncomfortable effort to say I understood, to say that I was there in case it was serious. But after an hour or two of awkward fatherness, I went to bed. I know Brooke has forgiven me for falling asleep through Ellie’s cries, but I wonder sometimes how she feels about a father that slept through those helpless inward gasps.
*
Two years before Ellie got sick, Brooke’s father died. I had only had a year to avoid Marvin Heath’s steely eyes before I lost the chance to find out what was behind them. The Multiple Myeloma cancer ate his bones from the inside out, but he ultimately died of kidney failure and starvation. The man my new wife loved even more than her husband wasted away to an empty chrysalis, and I know for a time she was left with nothing. I did not know how to be there for her. I did not even know where
there was.
We all hovered for days before it actually happened. I was on the outside looking in. My tears weren’t Heath tears and I did not want to pretend I understood, even if I did. I was scared to mourn as Marvin’s wife mourned, as his children mourned. His bread of life. I did not want to intrude on something that was uniquely theirs. My feelings became transient and I found myself crying when I was alone. Not crying out of loss or pain. Just crying. Perhaps I should have intruded. I should have let them know I feared and mourned and understood in some small way. Or perhaps they found some unifying solace in their distaste for my distance. I won’t ever know now. The time is past and the subject is as welcome as a gravestone in a flowerbed.
That was the first and only time I have ever been around death. It is a process like the melting of an icicle. The memory goes, the body withers, the mind drips drips drips until there is nothing left to hang onto. One day, expectedly but quite arbitrarily, what is left crashes to the ground and it’s over. I spent the majority of the only year I knew Marvin Heath standing in the hallway outside his bedroom while his family watched him die within. He is the white walls of a dimly lit hall in my memory. He is gone. And all I hear are the echoes of dripping.
*
It has been two months since Ellie kept her mother awake and I slept two doors away. After having taken her to see a pediatrician, Brooke rushed Ellie to the emergency room while I was at school. When I came home six hours later, there was a note on the cupboard.
Come to the hospital as soon as you get home. Brooke. I tried to concentrate on simply pushing the air in and out of my lungs, pushing the echoes out of my head, as I drove the fifteen miles to the hospital. I got there in time to hear the doctor say the word
serious twice.
Ellie has a serious
bone infection called Osteomyelitis. It helps that you caught it early. It’s a serious
condition. It is an unfair word for a doctor to use. It cuts. It cuts whatever tendons or muscles hold your heart in your chest. Does it mean long term illness? Does it mean paralysis? Does it mean amputation? I looked at Ellie’s little legs and tried not to imagine their absence. Ellie was not crying anymore and Brooke was holding her in that way again. That watchful, prayerful, terrified way again. And I knew what serious meant. It meant eating from the inside out. It meant melting and withering. It meant drips.
Time in the hospital was marked by blood tests and beeps. Ellie gained strength and we finally took her home with just an IV in her arm and a six-week treatment to show for her scare. She has been up and down since then, mostly up, and the word serious has disappeared. But there are still nights when I look at her fragile baby body lying in her crib and I am forced to consider what death might mean. What will it be like when I’m on the inside? When there are no white walls to hide behind? I can sense it at times. It flattens me out. It is an ice storm. It freezes then shatters my heart and my lungs. Will I be left with nothing like Brooke was two years ago?
I think on the times when Ellie is laughing. When mom and dad and baby are dancing with our home wrapped around us, dancing in each other’s arms like leaves in a whirlwind and baby squeals with angelic bliss and mom starts crying, smiling and crying like her very essence might burst with joy and anguished ecstasy. I will not be left with nothing. I will have this. And I finally understand that prayerful grace that Brooke holds Ellie with. That same embrace that she gave her father. It is her dance. Her moment. She was not left with nothing.
Ellie is sleeping and there’s an echo in my head. No dripping. Just the sound of my baby breathing.
