silent night

He was conceived less than 19 weeks ago. Last weekend his mother started cramping, then bleeding. By the time she came to the hospital it was too late to stop labor, so he died and was born. And because I work at that hospital, and because my mother was his mother's nurse, I got to see something most people never see.

He would just fit in the palm of a grown man's hand, with his head resting against the fingertips and his tiny heels brushing the wrist. His skin is a dark rose-color, faintly translucent; I can see shadows of organs underneath, and over his chest a ribbing of thread-thin pale lines.

His face is perfect. The eyes are closed, the head tucked over one shoulder, just the way a living newborn's head falls when he sleeps. His nose is just simply a baby's nose, rounded and soft, like the nose on a miniature baby doll, but sculpted to impossible detail. His mouth opens just a little when we pick him up to weigh him.

His head slopes high in the back-- his face and body have not yet caught up with his brain. His body is still very thin, his legs looking like the legs of a malnourished child in Africa, little more than bone and blood vessels under the skin. But his feet, like his nose, are perfect miniatures, and so are his hands, with the fingers fine as cherry-stems. We take his handprints and footprints, I holding the ink pad while my mother presses each small hand and foot against it. Living babies are only ever footprinted, because they curl their hands into tight fists. But his little palms are open, and so we have a row of prints, two hands next to two feet, each one the size of one of my fingerprints.

His weight (7 ounces) was needed for the hospital record, but the prints we took for the mother. She did not want to see him at first, but my mother convinced her to see him and hold him. This is important, because otherwise she might go home thinking that the last four months yielded nothing but blood and heartbreak. Now she can see what a strange, sweet little man has been growing all these weeks, and she will be free to love him and mourn him. She has named him John.

He has a sister who is ten years old-- the age I was when my youngest brother was born, three years older than I was when my twin brother and sister died in the womb. I wonder if he will stay with her as she grows up, if she will think at times, say once or twice a year, to how old he would be now and what he would be doing. (18-- just finishing their first semester of college. In my head, Amy plays soccer and William plays piano. The first night they're home for Christmas break, Amy will stay up all night telling me stories of boys she's gone on dates with-- she's quite the flirt.)

I saw other babies that night, living babies, pink and chubby and squalling heartily as the nurses cleaned them. But this tiny broken thing will not leave me, and I think-- I cannot begin to tell you why-- that he was more beautiful than any of them.