Back Porch Farm

It’s that time of year again: The sun sets earlier, there is a wee nip of fall in the air, the divine smell of roasting chilies is everywhere, I am beginning to get sick of fresh veggies, and a deep melancholy is winding it’s way to the surface of my heart. Why does it surprise me year after year? I am happily busy with farm chores, family trips, visitors, daily life… and then my feet start to drag and I find myself turning inward. Yes, it’s that time of year again… time to light the candle, time to remember difficult memories. 6 yrs ago today, on August 28th, 2005, our son Rowan was born… and died. Or perhaps I should rephrase: He died and was born.

Rowan Cecil Scott Roch was 20 inches long and weighed 7 lbs 11 oz. He had wavy ginger hair. He looked like his namesake – his great grandmother Cecil. His eyes never gazed into mine and his lungs never knew the shock of the first inhalation of our atmosphere. He was beautiful, perfect, and dead.

Our last prenatal appointment was on a Tues and he was very active with a strong heartbeat, ready to take on birth and life. My due date was 4 days later – on a Saturday – and like clockwork, my contractions began in earnest, exactly on time. Birth bag was packed, car seat strapped in awaiting his little body, and we drove to the birth center, nervous and very, very excited to meet our son after a natural water birth. But the midwife could find no heartbeat. I didn’t worry for a second. Truly. It was all too right. My pregnancy had been picture-perfect, I had taken my pre-natals and fish oil, done my pre-natal yoga, meditated and talked to our son, had (reluctantly) one ultrasound at 25 wks, taken long walks while describing to our baby the beauties of the stark, windswept mesa we lived on. I had faith and I had trust… back then. The hospital nurse ran the ultrasound wand over my bursting belly again and again in silence. The midwives were silent. Randy was silent. The entire world seemed to hold it’s breath. “I am sorry Ms. Scott. There is no heartbeat. Your baby is dead.”

Time screeched to a halt. No one moved. I heard the blood rushing in my ears, pounding along with my racing heart, beating fiercely enough for both of us. Disbelief. Anger. But not grief – not yet. I slammed the door on my grief and my eyes remained dry. Some other part of my personality pulled out my “take charge” hat and slapped it firmly on my head, pushing back the panic, the collapse, the puddle on the floor I so badly wanted to be. “Are you sure?” Was that really my voice? I sounded so far away… so not like myself… so harsh… so stern. “Yes.” the nurse confirmed. “I am so very sorry.” I cleared my throat. “Well,” I said in the distant stranger’s voice, “I guess I don’t need a natural birth anymore as that was for my baby. Let’s get this over with then. I want an epidural and a C-section. Let’s do it.” Christ! Who WAS this woman talking? How could she be so cold and calculated?

It was 30 minutes before the anesthesiologist came to the room. My contractions continued. I told Randy to call my support person, Joanne, and tell her she didn’t need to come. I was all steel, teeth clenched. The anesthesiologist returned again after an additional 30 minutes to inform me he could not give me any form of anesthesia due to the types of supplements I had been taking. There was a chance my blood would not clot and I could bleed internally. Too risky. Joanne burst in, face stained with tears, and marched to my bed. “Not coming my ass! Fuck that!” Some how I found the ability to laugh – only she could have gotten away with that maneuver. My labor lasted 12 hrs, my heart numb and my body wracked with pain. My sole job was to keep my shit together and push away the stinkin’ elephant in the room: You are going through all this pain and suffering for nothing! Your baby is DEAD.

On the morning after my due date, with an unbelievable rush of pain, Rowan’s body sloshed out into the waiting hands of our loving midwife. I was cynically aware the doctor had let her catch – after all, there was no liability issue with an already dead baby. I closed my eyes in utter relief and drifted into a dark silence, so akin to the world he had just come from. After what seemed like eternity, there was a nudge against my arm, bringing me back to my exquisite pain. I opened my eyes upon Randy’s tear-stained face. In his arms was a little blanketed bundle. How could this be happening? Why were those long, strong limbs so still and white? Where was the newborn mewling? The thrashing, pink fists? I noticed then I was seeing the scene from above my body, void of emotion, watching the exhausted midwives, Joanne beside me, the nurse a discrete distant away, and Randy’s shoulders shaking in unchecked grief. I reached out instinctively for my son, cradled him tenderly, and set about examining every inch of his body with stoic remove. His tiny fingernails were stained with meconium. There was a crimson drop of blood resting just inside one nostril. His lips were the color of ripe cherries. His skin was white, waterlogged, wrinkled and blistered. I realized with a clinical eye that he had been dead for a few days and the lack of circulation had caused this. His wet hair was plastered against his head in light auburn waves. He was so very limp and heavy; It was hard to contain his drooping, flaccid appendages. My heart wrapped around him like a steel band of fierce protection. Laying on my side, both my body and soul in tremendous pain, I cuddled him tightly in my arms refusing to let go…. for a long time. The warmth he had borrowed from my womb slowly faded and his stiffening body became cold against me.

We were left alone to say our hello and goodbye to this tiny dream before us. I pushed away thoughts of our waiting home, so perfectly ready for him…. drawers filled with freshly laundered clothes, off-road stroller, baby packs and slings, stacks of cloth diapers and wool covers, everything organic, books, toys, and stuffed animals ready to greet him. We un-swaddled him together and bathed his blistered skin carefully – it was very fragile and tore so easily. He was as white as a porcelain doll. With characteristic practicality, I left him undiapered and undressed, merely re-swaddled in the blanket from the hospital. I knew his wrinkled body would first pass by the pathologist’s scalpel before burning to ashes in the crematorium. Why waste the organic cotton diapers and onsie, the wee matching hat and booties, still zipped tightly in my birth bag? We spent 4 hrs with our baby’s body, trying to remember every detail, every dimple, every lock of hair. We took dozens of pictures. We kissed his cold toes and fingers, his little nose so like my own. But I never had the courage to open his eyes. And then, against every bone in my body, we laid him on the bed, turned our backs, and walked slowly down the long corridor to our unexpected, new life and our waiting grief.

The midwives let us rest on a birth bed in their nurturing birth center. It had been over 24 hrs since we had slept and we had just survived the most difficult experience of our lives. Randy and I laid thankfully under the homemade quilt, wrapped in each other arms, our bodies completely empty and totally spent. And as the late summer rain began to fall outside the open windows, my heart released it’s iron control and the floodgates opened. I cried my first tears. And then I sobbed a river of grief for which there was no end.

And 6 yrs later I still cry. In fact, there is a pile of wadded tissues beside me as I type. Certainly the pain has subsided… changed. But it never leaves. It makes it more difficult that a cause was never found. Both Rowan and I underwent a battery of tests after his death, but nothing was uncovered – the mystery remains. Perhaps a wrapped cord? A clot in the cord? We will never know. People who have never lost a child make the assumption that a subsequent child will “make it all better”. They think the score card is settled, our grief erased, a baby for a baby. And, as parents who have lost a child know well, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead we feel the the absence of Isla’s big brother even more. There was suppose to be two! They should be growing up together, playing side by side, adventuring, loving, learning, experiencing life as siblings. When I first put Isla to my breast, her unfocused gray eyes searching my face, certainly I felt a great joy and a profound love. But I also remembered the feverish pain of my hot, swollen breasts, leaking colostrum that my son would never taste. At each developmental step Isla reaches, I realize more fully what we have missed with Rowan. I still have dreams about finding a little boy with red hair, adopting a little boy, rescuing a little boy. These dreams seem to increase around his birthday and around the holidays – the times for family celebration and togetherness, the times when I feel the hole in my heart the most.

It was a huge step in my healing process to purge our lives of all the baby things that Isla could no longer use. Even though Randy had a vasectomy several months after Isla’s birth, I still clung to the fantasy that I would miraculously get pregnant again, or our foster/adoption counselor would make that long awaited call to us. I believe I have fully accepted, finally, that Isla will be an only child, and even feel contentment in that acceptance. At the ripe age of 49, I am truly happy to be done with the newborn combat zone. But then Rowan’s birthday sneaks up on me and I find my mind full of fantasies of little red-headed boys once more.

It’s that time of year again.

And we miss you so much my son.