—In Memory of Logan
Friday, March 6, 2020
I did my taxes early for once, as we delayed going to our river home for spring break because Andrew’s daughter Erin gave birth to twins yesterday, three months premature. I was at the hospital earlier with Andrew and Erin’s husband Steven but left soon after her mother and grandmother arrived with the twins’ big sister. I’m fine with Andrew’s ex-wife, but it was just too crowded in Erin’s room, where they were all waiting, and I was the least needed during this time. Even two-year-old Kate was more useful, reminding her parents that she was born too early, and here she was, thriving. . . .
Thursday, March 5, 2020
The boy, Logan, was medivacked into Greenville shortly after birth in Goldsboro, where Steven works for the Air Force, the girl, Adi, then sent by ambulance, as she was not “in distress.” Erin rode the forty miles in the ambulance with Adi—an elective decision, they called wanting to be with her babies, which meant her ride would cost a fortune. That’s healthcare in America.
Andrew and I live in Greenville, both on the faculty at the university here. He stopped by my office shortly after I got out of class to tell me the babies had come, three months early, and he was on the way to the hospital. He looked shaken, and realizing the odds against these babies’ survival, I shut down my computer and left with him.
We got there before the babies’ parents but were not allowed to see Andrew’s new grandchildren until their parents cleared us. The ambulance had arrived, though Erin was being checked into a room a few corridors away. So we met Steven in the lobby and directed him to the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) we’d found but been barred from. Steven vouched for us, we signed in (name, relationship: grandfather, step-grandmother) and handed masks; we scrubbed, sanitized, entered, and were directed to the twins’ pods, Logan’s, then Adi’s, divided by thick plexiglass down the side.
Each baby incubated and wired, so many wires, connected to beeping monitors. Lights and numbers on the screen reported information I could not decipher to know how they were doing, but they certainly did not look like they were doing ok. Unbelievably tiny, and all those wires.
The babies’ attending physician entered NICU for rounds and started explaining to Steven, who looked overwhelmed. I nudged Andrew, not sure the scared father could take in what he was being told (I know I wasn’t understanding). Andrew, a chemist and father of three, responded to the doctor in questioning statements, using more lay terms that Steven (and I) could follow. The doctor’s gently-rendered responses, quiet tone, sad demeanor were not hope-inspiring.
The doctor then directed the NICU desk attendant to call Erin’s doctor and suggest sending her down to her babies. She was shaking visibly when an orderly pushed her in a wheelchair to her son’s pod. Tears fell when her daddy reached down to hug her.
In the sixteen years her father and I have been together, this was the first time I have ever seen Erin cry.
When her first-born, Kate, born six weeks early, spent her first weeks in NICU, Erin and Steven stayed with us to be closer to the hospital. Erin’s response upon returning from spending the day with her new baby was not much different from her response to life in general: petulant and put upon. When we asked how the day had gone, she would launch into a list of all the ways the medical staff had annoyed her.
“Okay, Negative Nelly, it’s time to tell me one good thing about your baby,” I would say after several minutes of letting her vent, the same tactic I’d employed when Andrew’s children spent summers with us, and teenage Erin began whining over dinner about one aggravation after another she’d been forced to endure at swim team practice, with her brothers afterward, eventually from a boyfriend. The first evening I made this request of new mother Erin, Steven lit up as his wife actually answered me, after a pause to think. Watch and learn, young man, I thought, as she reported that Kate had gained an ounce or two or, an evening or so later, that she had gone a little bit longer sleeping without her breathing stopping. They could take her home once she was breathing fully on her own.
During those first difficult days of watching and waiting, no one seemed to doubt that baby Kate would survive. And it seemed this time that, in spite of being impossibly tiny, Adi was being monitored similarly: wires to detect signs of distress that needed to be addressed while this baby’s lungs developed outside of the womb.
While nurses calmly monitored Adi, doctors worried over Logan. The doctor repeated to Erin, with Andrew’s help interpreting again, his concerns about Logan.
Logan’s cubicle was crowded with all of us and Erin’s wheelchair, so I moved over to Adi’s pod, where a nurse agreed with my remarking on her tiny but kicking leg that yes, I was seeing a little fighter. Emphasis on little. These babies were only about nine inches long, both under two pounds. Yet Adi had managed somehow to pull her leg out of the swaddling. Proof of life I was not seeing from the so-still baby boy in the other incubator.
Before wheeling Erin back to her room several minutes later, Steven pushed her over to see Adi. “Look how strong she is,” I said from the other side of the incubator. “She kicked that foot free.” Feeling so helpless in the face of Erin’s unusually quiet agony, I wanted to give her something hopeful to take back to her room, but inside, I was asking myself if I believed or just wanted to believe what I was showing her.
Hesitantly assured by the doctor that they at least seemed stabilized, for now, we all went back to Erin’s room, but Andrew and I didn’t stay long. It had been a very long day for Erin and Steven, and they needed whatever rest they might be able to get in a hospital, while worried about receiving a call from NICU to hurry back.
Friday, March 6, 2020
Andrew and I go through a similar NICU check-in ritual the next morning, stopping to see the twins first. Our names are on the approved list, so we scrub, sanitize, mask, and go right through to their pods. We stop at each pod, make ourselves look at these tiny, helpless beings, with so many wires taped to their finger-wide limbs, tangerine-sized heads. Their skin is not the color of any ethnicity I recognize. Adi is a dark magenta, Logan a dusty navy. Colors not associated with humans in the real world. For that matter, they don’t look very human.
Then on to Erin’s room where we wait with the distraught parents for Erin’s mother and maternal grandmother to arrive with Kate. I remember being horrified by all the wires taped to Kate’s tiny body when I first saw her, yet she had been about the weight of her siblings combined—and still so impossibly small.
By Friday afternoon, Logan was doing better, we thought, and I left the hospital, making more space for Erin’s mother, grandmother, and toddler in the small room. I did my taxes to pass the time, called my mom to let her know what was going on, responded to texts from my siblings, then stepmother as the news spread. Andrew came home with good news of Logan’s further improvement, news he shared in a detailed email to his family in Colorado and Texas, which I forwarded to my own concerned family in Louisiana and Georgia. We made plans with our neighbors to walk downtown for dinner. It was such a lovely spring evening, and we were feeling celebratory. Andrew was a grandfather again, and we had reason to hope all would be well.
But as we were preparing to go, Erin called her daddy, sobbing. Andrew discerned that they’d told her Logan would not survive. I texted to cancel dinner, saying we had to go back to the hospital. Erin’s mother and grandmother had already returned to Raleigh with Kate, so we sat alone with the stunned parents in Erin’s room, where we had joined them. Soon, the doctor called. It was time to go to the NICU to let Logan go.
“Do you want a chaplain,” asked one of the nurses. “No,” Andrew, an atheist, started to say but then turned to Erin, who also started to shake her head, but then turned to Steven and asked him. He nodded, yes, he would. They called for one, who arrived, not right away, but not keeping us waiting too long. Steven is from Arizona, where few (if any) churches are likely to have African American women pastors, but he did not seem fazed by the unfamiliar clergywoman. He was sitting in a chair the nurses had brought into Logan’s cubicle and set facing Erin’s wheelchair. The nurses unplugged poor Logan and laid him, free of all those wires, on a pillow placed over his parents’ knees.
Their only son. After two difficult pregnancies, Erin had requested having her tubes tied with the birth of the twins. They would not have another son.
After introducing herself to us all, the preacher asked if they wanted Logan baptized. Again, Erin turned to Steven, and Steven nodded yes. The preacher stepped away briefly and then returned with a vial of water, maybe some additional vestment she had donned.
The simple, short ceremony that followed is the most moving christening I have ever attended. Most I’ve witnessed are less about the ceremony than an opportunity to invite relatives to celebrate the new baby. It is usually a time of hope for a new life, not blessing a child before his brief life comes to an end. This baptism simply but sincerely acknowledged that a little person, a soul, existed, if only for thirty-six hours. The ritual took less than five minutes. No frills. Just offering this baby back to the God who the pastor, Steven, and I, maybe Erin, too, at least on this sad day, believed had sent him to his parents. No surprise, Andrew participated and cried tears along with us, even though he does not believe in God. He would have done anything, if there were anything he could have done, for his suffering daughter. If she needed an Amen, he would say amen, and mean it.
Erin asked if we wanted to kiss Logan, so we both kissed the baby. I couldn’t tell if he was still alive, but like Andrew, I would do anything Erin asked of me at that moment. I was watching her, in awe.
This was an Erin I had never seen before.
I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her husband as they leaned their heads together over their son. She spoke softly, and her words seemed to comfort him. We’ve always teased her to “be more stoic” as she responded melodramatically to any offense when she was a girl. But in this, too real crisis, that young woman showed she could be as stoic as her dad is as a regular character trait.
While Erin and Steven sat with their dying—or maybe already dead—son, the preacher stepped over to Adi’s cubicle, and I followed her. I am not a religious person, but I do believe that life is eternal, and I listened as she prayed. The nurse and I responded with a strong “Amen” when she finished. I thanked the preacher and wished she could know how grateful I was for her presence.
When Erin and Steven eventually nodded for a nurse to take Logan, I directed their attention to Adi’s incubator again. “Look at your daughter, Erin. She’s been kicking through all of this.” I was not lying, but I still wasn’t sure I wasn’t giving the false hope we’d had just hours before for Logan’s improvement, misplaced optimism that had led us to think we would be walking home about now, after a dinner downtown with friends.
The rest of March 2020
That was how our pandemic experience began. We were only just becoming aware of the pending threat of a virus that killed, though of course not yet aware of how our lives were about to change and for how long. We were more conscientious about the handwashing and sanitizing that is usual before entering a NICU, but still Andrew and I were allowed to be there, regardless of how useless we were. Allowed to watch over the dying baby, grieve with the stricken parents. The opportunity to share in their grief and suffering, in person, seemed neither unusual nor too much to ask. Within days, it would become a privilege of the past, as thousands, then millions of much more sentient people would pass on alone or with only masked medical personnel to witness, family barred from sitting with their loved ones as they slipped away, clergy not allowed in to give last rites.
Within days, we were not able to visit Erin, Steven, and Adi at the hospital. And after Erin’s discharge from the hospital, she and Steven had to choose which of the two of them would visit their daughter. Both were not allowed, and, after another little while, neither would they be allowed to take turns. By then, Erin had developed pneumonia (possibly a result of undiagnosed COVID) and was in the hospital in Goldsboro, which made the choice they had to stick to.
Summer 2020
Erin did not hold this daughter until Adi was three months old. She texted us a photo, and, though we couldn’t see it behind the mask, her smile was so big, we could feel its warmth bursting out of her eyes.
After one last visit to the hospital the day after Logan’s death, Andrew did not see his granddaughters again, neither the newborn nor her older sister, for five months. He finally went to visit just before we were to return to the university for the fall semester, knowing he would not visit his immunocompromised granddaughter once there was a possibility of his being exposed to COVID at work.
One wonders what this new baby perceived of the masked stranger who held her. He is a man whose smile regularly reaches his eyes, so, I know she could tell her granddaddy was happy to see her.
Adi grew and thrived, though we witnessed it only in photos.
“Send me a picture of the girls,” I texted one evening.
“Hard to do,” Erin replied. “Kate doesn’t like her little sister much, I don’t think.”
The photos she sent suggested otherwise.
Adi turned one just before Andrew and I got our first vaccination.
I saw her in person on Father’s Day 2021 for the first time since just after her brother died over sixteen months before. As Erin carried her younger daughter through our front door, Adi opened her arms wide and gave me such a big, warm smile, I might have convinced myself she recognized me from the long minutes I peered down at her in her incubator, willing her to live.
