So vulnerable and so touching,
His little body in our hands,
Although his spirit had flown,
His memory eternally remains.

***

NATANAEL CAME into the world ‘not born alive’ according to his Birth Certificate. Arriving a little before 11pm, and having showered him, we didn’t get to sleep until 3am. I got up at 6am to prepare for the arrival of the Heartfelt photographer at 7:30am, with our entire family arriving at 8am. We were very blessed that our entire close family, our parents and my daughters, made it through. All our brothers visited later. We changed rooms immediately afterwards; to Room 4 Room 7.

That night, October 31, we sobbed quite a bit. My first opportunity to let out a preponderance of emotions coincided with a visit from the social worker. I couldn’t believe she walked in and expected to see us when I was a mess, hugging Nathanael, ‘hanging out’. She didn’t think to ask if she could talk to us. Apologizing if I seemed rude, I asked her to come back later. That night was a dark night for Sarah and I, with many tears shed. We took a few videos of us experiencing our little man, before he had to go back to freshen up. That night I slept on a folding bed.

We received some visits on Saturday, November 1; some sweet friends brought some worship songs and we played them and cried and prayed. God touched us. The night was very similar to the previous one; we sat in silence and could not escape the reality that had now beset us. There’s nothing like the dichotomy of having a baby that won’t keep you up at night; a baby we wouldn’t hear from the nursery; a baby that didn’t wake us up multiple times during the night.

The visits we received from the psychologist and the psychiatrist were polar opposites; both professionals, but the latter so humble and appropriately speechless. God, thank you for Dr. Ray Binns. The psychologist could not tell us more than we already knew; the resources that he offered, like Pauline Boss’s work on complaints, which is great, I’ve studied for a long time and have written about often.

It was typical for us to have Nathanael with us for several hours in the morning and then have him all afternoon into the evening. We would hold it. We wore it a couple of times.

At first I thought Sarah might be out of the hospital sooner, but it was fitting that she didn’t leave on Monday the 3rd but on Tuesday the 4th: she had something akin to the third-day blues. It was wise to leave when we did. We met with the funeral director and our funeral home minister the afternoon Sarah arrived home.

We had planned to visit Nathanael in the Perinatal Pathology Room on Wednesday, but Sarah took a turn for the worse walking 100 meters to the hospital. We missed our appointment because Sarah spent a few hours in the emergency department. So we visited on Thursday morning. The funeral was on Friday.

By the time the funeral came, we had had access to Nathaniel for 179 hours. We really enjoyed (if that’s the right word) all that time. We made the most of it and have no regrets.

God gave us so much in our experience of our son.

© 2014 SJ Wickham.