Heartbeat

I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll than human. I marvel at this creature, so untouched and unbruised that she seems unearthly. “Are you of this world?” I whisper. And so small. So, so small. I watch her, lying on the bed, and I go over the notes from my pre-natal baby care class in my head. 

Make sure she eats every two to three hours, or she won’t put on weight and may die. 

Make sure she is peeing four to six times a day; if not, she isn’t getting enough to eat and may die. 

Make sure to wash your hands before you touch her; she could get sick from harmful bacteria and die.

Make sure she doesn’t put anything too small in her mouth; she could choke on it and die.

Make sure she sleeps on her back with nothing in the crib, or she could stop breathing and die.

It occurs to me that there are an infinite number of ways that my baby could die, and it is up to me, an untrained civilian with no prior experience whatsoever, to anticipate them all. They say babies, children, people are hardy. “Stronger than you think!” But only the parents of those who have already mastered living say that.

I think of the ways that I could kill my baby: I could drop her, roll onto her in my sleep, sit on her, feed her something that chokes her.

I think of the ways that others could kill my baby: she could get hit by a car; she could be in a car that gets hit by another car; she could get kidnapped and murdered; she could be shot at school.

I think of the ways that my baby’s own body could kill her: cancer, that could be growing inside of her in the dark even now, in her bones or in her blood.

I think of how my baby could just die on her own for no reason at all. Her heart could just stop beating. She could just stop breathing. And that would be it.

And none of this is close to an exhaustive list.

I watch the news and see pictures of children in their posed photos, gap-toothed and shiny-eyed, the last school photos they got to take before they died, and the faces of those children morph into the face of my own child. I wonder about the mothers of those children. How do they survive it? How do they go on? It seems impossible. It seems absurd. I think that if it happened to me, if my baby died, I would just collapse on the spot and fold into the dirt and not ever want to move again. But having lived on this earth for a while, I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to keep going. You’re supposed to live on. People sympathize for a while, but after too long of a time, they get annoyed. If I continued to lie in the dirt, that would be attention-seeking and melodramatic. People only have so much patience for grief.

So I practice the hard thing that I don’t think I can do so that I can do it one day if I have to. I imagine that my baby has died. I imagine the cold shock of the news. I imagine the disorienting nausea, the ringing in my ears, my tears. The prickling sweat on the soles of my feet that only comes when something incredibly terrible happens. It’s difficult, but I can do it. Then I imagine the funeral. The people who come with their gray faces. This is very difficult. There is something about having your grief mirrored in someone else’s face that magnifies it. And when I get to the burial, a small box suspended over a hole of the same size in the ground, that is when I lose it. I know I can’t let them put her down there. My heart is on fire, and I can’t let them do it because she would be alone and scared, and it is so so dark in the earth, in that box, and if I let them put her in the ground, she would really be dead and I lied when I said I could do the part where I found out she died because I don’t think I can and I might not ever stop crying and I might just drown in my own tears. But that might be okay if that means I could go with her. We could be in the box together and in the ground together and neither of us would be alone or scared. We would just be. Together.

At this point, I am heaving with sobs, congested with snot, and I have to shake myself out of it. What am I doing? Stop being an idiot and thinking these stupid and crazy things. Take a breath. And another. And another. I lie down next to her, the summer sunlight reflecting off the white walls and wrapping us in gold, her quick, soft breath cooling the dampness on my face. I watch the tick-tock of her chest, the silent metronome of her beating heart. I slide my finger under hers and she grasps it, curling her fingers around mine, her grip surprisingly strong and tenacious. No one told me about this, that love could be so stricken, that it could make my own life feel so precarious. That love could tie my pulse to another’s. We’ll just have to keep each other alive, I tell her. Your life is in my hands, but now my life is in yours, too.