It is always the haunting. Life can be that way. The long shadows and the gigantic belly of my stalwart wife, identical twins this time. Just a couple weeks until we meet them, from wherever they came — the water, the stars, the earth.
The survey is constant:
How did I land here? I was the one once searching crannies of my long-past-due rented place for change, all the money I had in the world, for 40s of King Cobra. The prospects of future days laid out like the dirty pennies and tasting the same. I didn’t own a toothbrush.
The survey then was constant, too: How long could one skate by on charm, a fleeting and flimsy flip side to wrenching dread and despair? Some thin veil between the living and the dead.
October was always the most beautiful month, the mesmeric quality of softening light leading up to Halloween and Día de los Muertos. Especially in my old penurious neighborhood off downtown Phoenix, so strangely complex and festive, tin roofs, adobes and casitas flying stringed murciélagos and calaveras. The neighborhood came alive in silence as days waned in charred-orange glory. It was ritualistic. Happy hour.
My mother was born on Halloween, the day so rooted in the ancient Samhain celebration of a Celtic New Year, the harvest season’s end, where ghosts return to holiday with the living. As children, my mother’s mandatory birthday celebration merely got in the way of our tricks and treats. Halloween or no, nary a day passes when I don’t wish her among us, when I think of how my maternal grandmother outlived my mom. I consider the final time we touched her, ashes dusted into a chilly Northern Arizona creek. Her story came to life, and these lives of my siblings and me, my children, their children, my longings, our longings, all the mistakes, anger and love and joy, the smoldering strength of her ways and words, returned to dust and water.
A few of my best friends died long, long before they could physically age out. It was painful, yet weirdly understandable, watching them struggle in impatience, or stymied by anguish, until whatever toxins or a gun finished them off. They whirl about now as this month darkens.
I remember a William Burroughs bit from long ago, about leaving everything behind to change, and the line that forever stuck with me was, “Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.”
Our daughters Rickie and Zuzu dance and sing together now, mixing English and Spanish in toddler-speak, all alight on an unyielding fancy for the bones and haunts of Halloween and Day of the Dead, in pumpkin dresses and skeleton shirts, rhyming chants from the “Chumbala Cachumbala Dance.” They get frightened, this fascination with the side of the indefinite, maybe a way to manage tender emotions. In that some kind of lesson, in a suitable month for such.
Wait. Start from scratch:
The very moment I am writing this, I stop to take my wife to a necessary ultrasound for her pregnancy. The few days and nights leading up to this moment were tough on her, suffering immense discomfort and pain. Beyond her pregnancy, she breastfeeds Rickie and Zuzu, so any pain relievers of any kind are out.
She arrives at her appointment, and we are told by one gifted female doctor that “the babies should come out soon.” In very broad terms, we discover the smaller twin, Nora Millie, has, essentially, for the last several days, been sort of supplying the other, Ava Marigold, with more nutrients, since they share the same placenta, yet are sheltered in their own sacs.
I get her to the hospital, and take my daughters on a drive for food. In that moment, Maggie is put under, opened up and the babies are birthed, a month or so early. Ava out first, and Nora, nestled under Maggie’s ribcage, swims to freedom, amazed doctors calling her “a fighter.” Another 10 minutes and Nora would have died. There is brilliance at work on the Banner Hospital grounds.
In the several hours after the births, I felt like a dazed survivor of a tornado. I couldn’t see Maggie or the babies. Maggie in post-op care, and Ava and Nora sequestered, delicate as sparrow hatchlings, inside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). They’re boxed inside incubators, or “terrariums” and “alien pods,” as Maggie calls them, attached to various tubes and monitors. But we have other children, and they needed me. My daughters asking, “Ava and Nora here? Mama.”
Hospital rooms take on an unearthly look, squeaky, vacuum-sealed, like they could be floating in space. Two nights we were allowed to sleep in one with my wife, as she recovered. She was out on her feet less than 48 hours after the cesarean birth delivery, having only taken Tylenol for pain throughout, a tinge of visible fogginess in her movements but not her actions. She left the hospital resplendent in a black-and-white patterned dress and Rickie’s little princess crown she handed Mama to wear. A fitting garland, perched atop living proof of a female universe.
The next day, Nora struggled to survive, the ailments vague to these medicine-challenged ears, the cures less so, and so dependent on round-the-clock care and testing. (Which, in this particular hospital, is filled with empathy and kindness.) Yet the thin veil between life and death was suddenly free of any romance; it was more of a horror show. Helplessness fell over us. We longed for relief to swirl out from any direction, in any moment. I almost stepped back into a Catholic church, this cockeyed atheist with a Jewish wife. I secretly whispered to my dead parents for help. Our families sent healing thoughts. My wife’s congregation transmitted prayers. Our eldest, Reece, stepped up to help, the 10-year-old bearing an advanced wisdom and understanding.
As a close friend who’s been around his own family preemies said in a text, “It’s amazing the technology now. It’s scary, but they [preemies] catch up fast, trust the doctors and nature.” He was right; you can hunt externally and internally for answers until there is nothing left but the exasperating hunt itself. To me, with inescapable grief coming down, in Nora’s early hours, it was like a part of her hadn’t yet arrived because she was too tender and soft and beautiful for this Earth. But that little girl can fight, and Maggie and I trusted love and life and both Ava and Nora are tender, soft and beautiful for this Earth.
So now, more than a week later, both Ava and Nora are growing, tiny fingers and eyes, nervous systems and hearts, pooping and peeing, hitting the daily milestones and with zero signs of internal or external impairment.
Still, Ava and Nora remain in NICU, miles from our home. Their translucent skin the color of pumpkin pie slack on tiny bones. Such separation from our newborn daughters rekindles deep hues of loneliness and anxiety, no matter how many times a day we visit.
It breaks my heart even more to witness Maggie bear such emotional torment. Her entire biological and emotional being is sharp-edged now, formulated to nurse the tiny ones, to be their mother in the lattice of home and family. Her need to have them with her, away from strangers, skin on skin, tiny mouths to breasts, is so primal, so instinctual, so natural. As a husband, I find myself unprepared and clumsy in my attempts to ease her suffering, an out-of-tune violin in an otherwise aching orchestra movement.
Maggie arrives at the NICU daily with fresh breast milk for Ava and Nora, facilitating the lovely skin-to-skin mother-child bond. Ava and Nora will be home very soon, we’re told, Ava in days, and a week or two later, Nora.
It is nearly Halloween, a time even more sacrosanct and alive than ever in my life. I consider all this when I touch and whisper loves to the brand-new girls, our children, and my wife.
