My Son Zachary

ON THE AFTERNOON of August 20, 1983, 13 weeks before the usual 40-week end of pregnancy, Gerry and Zachary were born.

Gerry was first, at 3:30 p.m., weighing one pound, 14 ounces. Zachary was delivered three minutes later, weighing one pound, 11 ounces.

I wasn’t in the room when De a gave birth by cesarian section. I watched through a window as a tiny, quivering object was lifted into the world. I remember the chaos of that moment, all those doctor and nurses surrounding Debra on the operating table like beggars after food. I remember my intense feeling of isolation, as if I had nothing to do with the life-and-death helter-skelter of what was unfolding, was merely an outsider looking in at something shocking and bizarre and oddly fascinating. Who was that woman inside that window? Who was that quivering shape held up by a nurse? A son? My son? Whose son?

I do not know for sure, because we never fully know when feelings form, but I wonder now if 1 forever changed at that moment. I had always been drawn to melancholia, to a sense of life as something so often bittersweet. But as I watched from that window, a difference crept in, a feeling that nothing in life could ever be fully trusted, that expectation at best was just a laughing taunt. When a nurse came away from the window so I didn’t have to see anymore, I felt merciful relief.

Later that night, I wrote down what I was feeling and put the words into a folder. I haven’t looked at them, either, since they were written, and the idea of rereading them now fills me with the same kind of anxiety that the Inquirer article did, moving me back into a life I had successfully suppressed. But I feel I must reread them. And when I do, the floodgates open, as I knew they would, fear and love and bravery and numbness in those raw and visceral words, the clash and collision of emotion, over and over:

Aug. 20, 1983

I feel a coldness in my heart, a certain emptiness. I thought that the actual moment of having children would be so joyous and wonderful, but I wasn’t prepared. There was no time. I came into the hospital with a red Lacoste shirt with three holes and gym shorts and sneakers without socks. I thought in fact that we had come over the hump, that Deb would go to 33 weeks, and that my presence at the hospital today wasn’t even necessary.

I don’t know how to react. There is no passing of cigars, and the occasion is filled with the kind of bittersweet and dramatic sadness I have gravitated toward all my life. There is no joy, only numbness and pain. But there is hope. Already I love my sons, and as I see them on the second floor of the intensive care nursery, on their backs, struggling for each breath, I feel for them and struggle with them.

Zachary is fighting for his life tonight. I can feel that as I watch him. But he is a fighter, responsive to a touch, wrapping his tiny, perfectly shaped fingers, no bigger than a needle broken in two, around my forefinger. I stroke his and Gerry’s heads; their eyes are closed. They are laboring to live, tiny, their hands no bigger than the size of the top of my thumb. They are dark-complected, perfectly sweet.

Tonight at midnight Zachary was covered with Saran Wrap to keep the warmth in, and then his eyes were covered with blinders so special light could be placed over him. He has RDS, and his oxygen level is at close to 90 percent. Gerry is doing much better. He doesn’t labor quite as much and seems more peaceful. His oxygen level is at about 70 percent.

Should I act like a father, excited and proud? Or am I really a caretaker of death? Will I watch my tiny boys grow? Or will I watch them struggle and die? I must have hope, and I do.

My wife is drugged out on morphine tonight. I am not sure whether she really knows what has happened. She is running a fever of I03, and I pray to God that it is nothing serious. I love her so much, and the strength she has shown has been remarkable.

When they were taken out of the operating room in incubators, I did not know how to react. I was not sure if I felt anything. They were so small, and it was impossible to make any kind of emotional connection to them. I mean, in a way, why were they my babies? They did not look like me. They showed no personality. How could I relate?

I felt differently when I saw them in the nursery. And each time I see them, I feel closer to them. I can identify with them. They are cute and lovable to me. My parents came from Blairstown and saw them about 7 p.m. They were disturbed and did not touch them. My father later admitted that he was afraid to touch them. There is that sense, when you see them with the tubes coming out of every which direction and all the machinery surrounding them, that they are not babies at all but some kind of lab experiment, like rabbits. But I believe that they do have personalities. I believe that they do respond to me, that my presence is important and means something to them.

When will the uncertainty end? When will the agony end? When can Deb and Ibecome parents and not just another part of the scientific experiment?