- Jun 8
- 28 min read
Updated: Jun 12
The Martini Project
I was making myself a gin martini on a recent Saturday evening when my mother asked if I wanted to see a copy of my father’s autopsy report. He had been dead six weeks. There are only a few different ways I make martinis, and I can explain it for you pretty easily if you’re new to this or curious about the unusual world that spills open as a martini drains in your hand. Mine, that night, frosted its low tapered glass, oily bubbles from its three olives rising and spreading over the icy flat surface. I took a drink and involuntarily closed my eyes, swallowing, running my tongue along the exterior and interior of my upper front teeth. I told my mother, “Sure,” and she promised to send me the autopsy report before going to bed that night, and we proceeded to talk about what my daughter wanted for her upcoming fourth birthday, which she would end up sharing with my son, who was born seven days ago, seven weeks before his due date, and whom I held in the N.I.C.U. for several hours last night and will do so again tonight.
This, then, is my story of becoming a father. My name is Stephen Tremaine Nelson and I was born in Portland, Oregon on June 17, 1981. I became a father on April 13, 2013, when my daughter Esmé was born. My son Leo was born exactly four years later to the day, on April 13, 2017. My parents were born-again Christians, and, meaning well, they raised me and my little sister K— in their ultraconservative Evangelical faith. My wife’s name was Emma. She was twenty-two years old when I asked her to marry me, and, while shaking her head, no, she said: yes. She was in love with me, and she knew how hard our lives would be together. We lived in relative harmony, if volatilely in love, for ten years before we became parents. Our daughter was born in New York City. But within three months, never able to afford the city on a single salary, we left and moved to Burlington, Vermont, where my wife had been offered a job at a university, working on a federal grant, helping children with special needs, children who were deaf-blind.
In the N.I.C.U. tonight my son Leo’s heartrate spiked as high as 190 beats per minute and sank as low as a third of that number until two of the night shift nurses came to shut off the red ping ping ping alarm which always turns the heads of the other tired parents in the room, mostly mothers, who have survived plenty of their own red alarms. The sound of the alarm reminds us of the percentage of children who do not survive their time in this room, a dark number we roll around in our mouths and spit out when the nurses aren’t looking because we all believe our own child is different, able to defy those statistics, that our son is plenty strong enough to make it, that a mysterious God is on our side.
My son, Leo, he’s a good boy. There’s nothing wrong with him except that he was born seven weeks early and he was born “stunned,” a medical term that explains the limp useless hanging of his arms and limbs as they carried him to the heated scale and blew oxygen into his nostrils and vigorously rubbed his feet until he decided to live. Now, barely a week old, his heartrate pinballs wildly up and down and he breathes normally until he doesn’t, and if his head falls forward it closes his windpipe and the color drains from his skin because the oxygen is draining from his brain, and so we have to watch him and his monitors and notify his nurses if anything dangerous happens, an hourly occurrence. He has a tube that climbs into his nostril and descends his esophagus and settles into the pulpy core of his stomach. This is called the Givache tube, which allows a gravity drip of breast milk that Emma has been pumping at three hour intervals, twenty-four hours a day, to drip and feed him at a slow enough interval that it doesn’t splash up into his throat and choke him, while his esophagal flap and the other body parts continue growing their normal pace to full term. He was born at five pounds, five ounces, and eighteen inches, and we are luckier than most of these other parents—I’m looking at them now—but that does not mean we are spared from the dark imagination that every parent here in this room shares while scrolling through statistics about premature infancies on the internet, at night, between feedings.
After having lived in Manhattan for close to a decade, we had only lasted three short months in New York City as parents. Still shocked at this new reality, we left the city and settled into our first winter in Northern Vermont in 2013, as Emma started her new job, and our baby daughter, wracked with colic, screamed night after night, week after week, as the nights grew cold and dark, and I started to wonder about the inextricable relationship of poetry & madness or per King Lear: “untuned and jarring senses.”
Days and weeks of sleep deprivation left me feeling unhinged, broken. The nights grew colder and darker. I was not myself, and neither was my wife in full possession of her faculties, but this was temporary, we told ourselves; this would not last, we promised ourselves, and yet my curiosity about the relationship of poetry and madness only deepened as time went by, with no relief from the winter in sight, as we counted down the days until spring.
New parents, alone in that guarded, frozen state, we kept waiting for our lives to become normal again—easier, sane. When our daughter turned one, when spring finally came in Vermont, after we had been parents for an entire year, we kept saying: Now it’ll get easier. But it didn’t. We survived another brutally cold North Country winter, and, finally, spring. When our daughter turned two, we kept saying: Surely, now, we’ll rest. But we didn’t—night after night of insomnia, our daughter awake and screaming from teeth or terror or hunger, all of which were possibly normal for a child her age, all of which added up to the reality of parenthood. And yet the electricity in my brain crackled higher and hotter than I could bear; it would subside, only to rise again, leaving me mentally winded, diffuse, in need of an outlet.
And so, as the prospect of a third winter in Vermont emerged, in the falling leaves, a full year before the birth of my son and death of my father, I decided I would give myself a project. I needed it: Something that would cool my mind and allow me to inhabit a new psychological space beyond the current of Fatherhood. I was an editor, a critic, a writer. I had always enjoyed writing stories and book reviews of esoteric Latin American literature. I had worked in the fiction department of The New Yorker, reading submissions and collaborating with the other editors on accepting or rejecting a story for the magazine. I had also, during our literary years in New York, befriended and benefited from the generous mentorship of renown translator, Gregory Rabassa, who had translated Hopscotch and One Hundred Years of Solitude from Spanish into English—he had taken me under his tutelage and taught me, over glasses of wine in cafes on the Upper East Side. But, now removed from literary New York, in the absence of Rabassa’s mentorship, I needed to try something new, different, something to vent the heat in my head.
A part of my creative soul had fallen dormant, and I wondered if it would cure me, or help me, to revive it. Just a few months, I thought, maybe a year: I’ll work on something different, something quick and loose, on a typewriter with unpredictable ink; meanwhile, in the back of my mind, as I gave into the urge to write poetry, finally, the thought was never very far from my mind that my life might finally start falling apart. When it did, I wasn’t surprised. I had expected it. We had endured so much, for so many years. I had held it together as long as I could, and, now, it would all come falling apart. All the young poets I knew were insane or wanted to be or had been or feared they would be again. The brain’s bloodflow, which we call the muse, is only a few keys to the left or right of the cerebral typewriter which taps out sentences of anxiety and depression and hallucinatory mid-life nightmares.
The rules were simple. The poem must be conceived and executed without revision in the time it takes to drink a martini. That’s it. How foolish of me to imagine a glass ashtray to the left of a typewriter—the image now fading to black and white—with the light pooling on the surface of the cocktail to my right, and lifting my eyes I would study the walls of unframed paintings and thirsty plants and stacks of books shelved from floor to ceiling where an old-fashioned fan circled lazily overhead.
There on the table, I opened my typewriter the night of my first Martini Poem. Our daughter, Esmé, slept and snored lightly down the hall. The number 1 key did not work, nor the asterisk, and only now and then could I rely on the apostrophe to leave any kind of legible black mark on the crisp white page. The warmest letters, those within quick resting reach of my middle fingers, hammered the page with bold black ink, whereas the outlying keys that relied on my weaker ring and pinky fingers dropped to the page softly, whispering their letters onto the page. I also drank the martini too quickly, at first; I glanced down to the olived toothpick, visible, with only a few words splashed across the page, and I made note to work more slowly, to measure how long it would take to relive a treasured memory or a moment of terror, in words, before finishing the drink.
In time, I saw how many of my poems were about becoming a father. In the first one, The Martini Poem: #1, I wrote about my memory of seeing Esmé, all of two days old, stuck in the hospital an extra night under the ultraviolet blue lights to kill off the toxic billirubin in her blood, to save her from jaundice: There in the incubator, she thrashed and cried/clawed at her own face, pulling off the frayed blinders they had placed on her eyes, and I watched her screaming—and I pounded on the glass from the other side, worried that the lights would blind her young eyes, until the nurse came back and covered her eyes again, calmed her, as I watched, helpless through the chicken-wire plexiglass.
Fatherhood, I learned, is an open phrase, colon:
Leo’s neighbor is a girl named Sarah who was born weighing two pounds, six ounces. Her bed is only four feet from my chair, here, where I sit and wait for Leo to wake up, so that I can feed him, hold him. I find myself telling him all about her, as if I were able to interpret her small cries and murmurs to him. “Your friend is hungry,” I might say to my son, or “your friend thinks we should all split a pizza,” or, more frequently, “your friend keeps forgetting to breathe.” Her apnea joins us as a purple “0” in the lower right corner of her monitor, flashing red and ringing so loud I can see Leo wincing through his sleep. I watch the little girl lying on her back and count her breathless seconds to myself. Usually, she starts breathing again in less than two seconds. One of the nurses will come to her bedside if the alarm lasts longer than, say, four seconds, and watch to see if she will start breathing again on her own, as this is a requirement for her eventual discharge.
The girl’s parents are Mennonites, or I should say that they dress like the Mennonite family who lived near us when I was a kid, with bonnets, long neckbeards and bobby pins holding their stiff starched sheets together instead of buttons. We share an unusual intimacy with them because we are in this N.I.C.U. ward together, within a few feet of each other, and it is impossible not to hear each other’s conversations. The husband and the wife speak to each other, and to their daughter, in a language I have never heard. It has the uptilt of Canadian English, with some German thickness, smoothed over with what I imagine as the steady consonance of some Scandinavian influence. They live in Upstate New York in a community without electricity, and there is concern among the nurses about how the family will monitor the girl’s apnea if they are unable to plug in a respiratory monitor into an electrical outlet. There are also quiet whispers among the nurses that the family does not have health insurance, and the father is eager to leave the hospital, even as his daughter stops breathing, since the bill may exceed what the family earns in a year.
Across the room from us, out of earshot but in our direct line of sight, Emma and I watch the couple we refer to privately as the “hipster parents,” whose son appears healthy, strong, and whose monitor never seems to summon anyone for help. The mom wears stylish woven sandals, even though it’s still freezing outside, and the dad has his long black hair pulled into a bun. We exchange nervous waves and quiet greetings coming in and out of the ward. Because I have seen this dad’s body naked from the waist up, his back splashed and inked with Japanese dragon cartoons, I can only assume that he has, likewise, seen me removing my shirt to hold Leo in the crook of my neck, so that our bodies can heat each other and mingle our sweat as his nightly cocktail of breast milk and calcium and Vitamin D drip slowly into his nose and settle in the pit of his stomach. Emma and I can’t agree on whether we feel safer with the older grey-haired nurses who are unfazed by our son’s fragility or the optimistic recent college grads who hurry to check on Leo every time his heartrate rings the bright red alarm. On one hand, the young nurse has not yet had a child die in her arms, whereas the older nurse has seen everything that can cause a baby to—expire—I fear, is the word that wanders the halls of the hospital in a hooded black cloak, silently visiting a different floor every night.
Something different has now happened in the ward. Panic, terror, noise: We have been visiting our son long enough that we have learned to decode the shortened sentences and euphemisms and acronyms they use to shield us from anything that may increase our fear. But we can still see their eyes, the nurses. Emma came home this afternoon, shaken, distracted, and unable to give me a clear update on Leo’s health and progress, except to tell me the ward was now in something called: Isolation. It’s fine, she kept saying. He’s going to be fine, except she had never come home to tell me anything except the granular details of his weight gain, his skin color, and the number of times his heart had stopped beating and whether all of the bradycardiac moments had self-corrected or needed help. To learn, then, that we would now wear masks and gloves and gowns whenever we visited our son marked a new phase of our time in the ward, and now we experienced real fear.
Turning the corner, and peering into the darkened ward, I saw Leo’s monitor and placed my hands on his Isolette and peered inside, where he was sleeping quietly, his arms raised above head, his mouth slightly agape, his heart beating steadily, silently. It was only when I turned to sit by his side that I looked across the room and saw that one of the other children was gone. Whereas the night before, bright blue stickers and cards and curlicue hearts had decorated the whiteboard of the Hipster Parents’ baby, now there was nothing: Every trace of the child had vanished from the ward.
The following morning, chaos descended upon the N.I.C.U. Whatever had started slowly the first day was now viral. Monitors beeped in all corners of the room. My first fear: Leo’s heart would stop because the virus had entered his lungs and filled them with water, and he would stop breathing and quietly die. My second fear: Leo’s body would start fighting the virus by raising his body temperature higher than the virus could withstand, say, one hundred and six degrees, and this fever would succeed in killing the virus because it would also kill the host—my son. My third fear: The virus would fill his throat with phlegm and he would fight it by coughing until his energy gave out, and we would hear the weakened muscles in his throat wheezing until he could no longer keep coughing, and he would drown. Leo weighed four pounds, four ounces, the night the virus entered the ward. He had been alive for ten days. He had already lost twenty percent of his body’s weight, still declining.
I understood from the conversations in the ward that more children would become afflicted. The conversation turned to a swab test which the nurses would administer along the interior of the children’s nostrils, and they would separate the children into those who were already positive and those who were not yet positive. The virus also now had a name. It was an old name. The virus now infecting the N.I.C.U. was Influenza. They also told us they would not be admitting any new babies into this section of the N.I.C.U. Our children were quarantined. They were not telling us, officially, what the name of the virus was that had infected the children—not yet. Possibly, they did not yet know; possibly, they had to follow Isolation Protocol. But one parent heard another parent, who had heard a nurse in the hallway, who had whispered the name of the virus to someone in passing. It’s the flu, parents would whisper to another. The child they took away—she had the flu. Two pounds, couple of ounces, some of the children, there in the ward, not much immune system to speak of, not yet. Ten minutes later, a different mother said she had heard a nurse and a doctor in the hall say the word parainfluenza, which conjured in my mind the word paralysis. Sitting, frozen in my chair, watching Leo, I wore a gauze mask, latex gloves, plastic gown, counting down the minutes until his next feeding, and I thought: a flu that causes paralysis—maybe worse. The other parents, stunned, held their children tighter or stared at them through the glass walls of their cage for fear of bringing them out and into the air where it lived. The question I wanted to ask someone was: What happened to the baby they took away?
The obvious answer is that he was dead.
I didn’t ask, though I desperately wanted to, and I understood how foolish it would be to tell a room full of anxious parents that the baby they had seen for the past week, whose parents we had waved to in the halls, was now dead. The nurses would not be able to keep us in that room if we knew that had happened, and even if some cooler heads may have prevailed, I expected that some of the parents would have picked up their children and walked right out. Even if they still followed the official protocol, that was exactly what the other family did who had lived next to us, the Mennonites, as I thought of them, speaking their anxious private tongue. When we all poked and prodded the nurses for questions about the whereabouts of the child of the Hipster Parents, and the only responses we could get related to privacy and medical records and the safety of the family, the Mennonite parents told the nurses they were leaving.
Just a few short weeks before Leo was born, I had received a phone call from my mother. My mother was calm over the phone, detached—and that worried me. I could feel before she even told me that the accident had involved my father. She had not yet told me, but I knew. He just collapsed, she said. He was going up the stairs and I heard a loud crash. I came running from the kitchen, and he had collapsed. He isn’t breathing. Voices shouted through the phone, and she said the paramedics had arrived and she would call me back. Tell K—, she added, before hanging up, and I answered the call from my sister that came in the second I hung up with my mother. She had left similar messages on my sister’s phone as well, and I relayed what little information my mom had given me so far, and my sister started crying quietly into the phone and asked if we could stay on the line together until our mom tried calling us back, and, hearing the fear in my sister’s voice, I realized our father was dying. He was fifty-nine. I was thirty-five. My sister was thirty-three, her husband thirty-four, and her infant daughter, my niece, had been born sixteen days earlier. Emma was thirty-four and twenty weeks pregnant. Our daughter was three. And my mom was fifty-nine. That was our family, then, on January 2.
I had just concluded The Martini Project: all 56 poems.
It is hard for me to believe that only 103 days later Emma gently woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me something was wrong with her body. She kept apologizing for waking me up. I was sleeping on the couch that night because the later pregnancy had made her snore so loudly, and she stood with a hand on the wall, her other hand holding her distended belly, as she explained that she had woken up completely soaking wet and her doctor had asked her to come into the hospital immediately. It was probably nothing, she said unconvincingly, or it was possible her water had broken seven weeks early, and neither of us knew what that meant. I asked her if she could still feel our son, alive in her womb, and she nodded yes. He was still there, moving. The date was April 13: our daughter’s fourth birthday. Essie was still asleep in her room, as it was four o’clock in the morning, and Emma insisted she was fine to drive herself up to the hospital and that I should stay home with our girl and get her to school and be sure that I didn’t forget the cupcakes Emma ordered for her birthday party.
When Essie woke up, she asked me where Mama was. Emma had instructed me to make up a story about work, but I did not like lying to my daughter, even at such an age when certain topics create more questions than they answer, so I told her Mama had gone to see her doctor about the baby, and that was enough. After processing the information, the day settled into what would have been her morning routine, except that she remembered it was her birthday, her eyes lit up, and she ran into my arms and asked how many of her birthday presents we could open before school. I said all of them, of course, because I’m soft and I love her.
Emma texted me at 6:12 a.m. to say: Checked in safe and sound. They are checking to see what all is happening will give you an update asap. Please give our girl extra love I feel so sad to be missing her on her birthday. After dropping off our daughter at school and reminding her I would come back with cupcakes and to sing happy birthday to her with all the friends in her class, I read Emma’s next text in the hallway of our daughter’s school: I have premature rupture of membranes not in any active labor yet they will give me steroids for baby and hope to keep from delivering until 34 weeks. I’m here until baby comes. This is a nice room. I’m so sad to miss our girl. I went to the hospital and found her sitting upright in bed, reading. She was pretending to be cheerful, but I could tell she was terrified. Because she knew so much about early childhood development, she knew every single thing that could go wrong with a child born during the seventh month of pregnancy. And because he was breach, she had also learned that they were going to cut her open.
An hour later, I went back to the school where we all had cupcakes, and Essie clasped her hands together silently as all the other kids and her teachers and I sang her happy birthday. When all the kids filed into line to go outside to play, I told Essie to stay behind with me and have an extra cupcake so I could talk to her teachers for a minute. Now, I thought, how to tell this kid that her brother is going to be born way earlier than we expected without totally freaking her out. I needed her to stay at school long enough to figure out who was going to pick her up at school and bring her home and also figure out where she was going to spend the night (on her birthday) if I had to stay at the hospital all night to witness the birth of my son. I had texted Emma’s mother, who lived more than six hours away, to see if she could drive up and stay with Essie in our apartment that night, but I hadn’t heard anything, and I needed to tell Essie and her teachers who would be picking her up when school was out. Our friends, who lived down the street and had a daughter the same age as ours, had agreed to stay over at our house with our girl, but because we were nearly two months before the due date they were out of town. I decided to tell her and her teachers at the same time, as if it was no big deal, and not overreact. I told her there was a special birthday surprise: her brother. He was probably going to be born later that evening, and her grandma was probably going to pick her up from school, if she could make the six-hour drive in time for the end of the school day. Her two teachers looked at me, mouths open, but quickly regaining their composure, pure professionals, who understood how hard the day would be if our daughter felt that anything unusual was happening, besides her brother’s birth. With that settled, her teachers wished me good luck and promised that they would stay as late as necessary with our daughter, or even walk her home to our house if needed to stay with her there. I thanked them and hugged my little girl and had to tear myself away from watching her run freely on the playground and telling all her little friends that she was finally going to meet her baby brother.
The previous evening, we had enjoyed a quiet dinner with our friends who lived across the street. My friend, the poet Brian Michael Murphy, and I had casually discussed the excellence of commercially produced music in the early 1990s, an unlikely byproduct of capitalism and record labels. The night before that, we had eaten dinner together as a family at home and watched Disney clips, mostly Moana, on YouTube, and stretching further back I see only images of family rituals, playing guitar on the front porch and praying for warmer weather, chalk on the sidewalk, watercolors and classical music together before reading books and getting ready for bed, all the quiet dance of proximity that add up to life as a family, and that Thursday evening on April 13 at 7:30 p.m. I held Emma’s hands, as she opened her eyes to watch my face, as I saw the surgeon scoop a pile of bloody wet wings out of my wife’s open belly until the air pushed aside the clumps of clotted flesh and a spine and arms flopped to the side, limp, and his head rolled to face me, eyes closed, blood dropletting from his chest back into Emma’s open body where I saw white cords of tendon and the braided red rope of her womb sliced open and gushing blood until they lifted him away and carved the marbled placenta glowing with the dark phosphorescence of nitrogen green and deoxygenated blues and the crimson red protein of life.
Emma said quietly to me: Go to him.
I squeezed her hands: He’s okay.
And she said it again: Go to him. And come back.
I watched over the shoulders of the doctors as they vigorously rubbed his foot and suctioned the fluid from his nose and quietly encouraged him to start breathing. They rubbed both his feet again and again and pressed into the sides of his purple core and opened his jaw and lowered oxygen onto his nose and finally he gasped to life and breathed and coughed dark fluid down his chin and over his chest and they cleaned him and I spoke quietly to him so that he would hear a familiar voice amidst the clamor of the operating room; he would know he was safe: I am here, I am here. On the way out of the operating room, Emma’s head rolled in his direction and she watched and saw him as he moved past us, pausing so she could see his face and know that he was alive, until they hurried him out of the cold room and upstairs to the N.I.C.U. where we have now entered the seventh day of Isolation Protocol.
I know the viral baby is still alive because why else would his father still wander the halls of the hospital: He is out there, right now, pacing. The more troubling trend, Emma and I agree, is the number of nurses who are now calling in sick, and it’s perhaps more troubling how many of them refuse to call in sick because someone still needs to take care of us, and even behind their gloved hands and masked faces I can hear the virus clicking and crawling around their lungs and chest as they cough and sneeze and pretend it’s just a cold. I am torn by my desire to hold Leo close to my chest so he knows that we have not abandoned him. He spends hours and hours in his Isolette with only the sounds of his monitor and the distant voices of the other children which the plastic wall of his home garbles like sound underwater. But our corner of the ward is still safe, still negative, even as the virus spreads to the other babies separated by six squares of linoleum tile and a linen curtain pulled uselessly around the wall of infected children whose parents sit by their side and wait.
When my mother called me again, she was sitting in the front seat of the ambulance, sirens flashing, carrying my father to the E.R. It had been more than eight minutes since they had left the house. I asked my mom if she wanted me to get my sis on the line, too, and I conferenced my sister onto the call and we were there, the three of us, together on the phone as the sirens of the ambulance wailed eerily in the background. Because I knew they would need to turn left at the top of the hill, I could picture the ambulance nosing into traffic, lights flashing, and barreling onto Highway 26 and I saw my mother’s tired eyes watching the other drivers watch her through the window as they pulled aside and let her pass. We still didn’t know what was happening, only that he had collapsed, and all my mom could tell us was that his heart still wasn’t beating. K— kept asking all these questions. Had they called ahead to the emergency room. My mom didn’t know. Did they have his blood type ready. My mom didn’t know. What exactly had he said when you picked him up at the shop. How long had he been working on the boat. What had he eaten all day. Had he been drinking any water. Where did he fall. Did he fall on his head. Did you do C.P.R. before the arrived. Yes, my mom said. Yes, she did C.P.R. She had done that much, at least. I could hear my infant niece crying in the background, all of sixteen days old. K— had hardly slept in three weeks. I could hear the tired wail of the ambulance sirens in the background. In my own apartment, it was silent, except for Emma, asking: Is there anything I can do?
Twelve minutes later, they arrived at the hospital. K— had stopped asking questions and was listening, crying quietly into the phone. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. And every few minutes my mom would ask if we were still there with her on the phone, and I would nod, and then I would say yes, I’m still here, and K— didn’t say anything but we knew she was still there from the sound of her crying. The doors of the ambulance opened and slammed shut and my mom stayed on the phone with us as she climbed out and we heard new voices from the medical team that came outside to help. We heard her explain everything that had happened again, to the new team: He had been working in his shop all day, on the boat. Sometimes he forgets to eat lunch, and he has low blood pressure, too. He called me to come pick him up because his head didn’t feel good. I picked him up, and we came inside and I went to the kitchen to make him something to eat, and he said he was going to wash up and come to dinner, and I heard a loud crash on the stairs. He collapsed. I rolled him onto his back and did C.P.R. I called 911. I kept doing C.P.R. to try to get him to breathe again.
It was harder to hear the voices asking her the questions. Soon, it was clear they were no longer asking her questions but telling her what was going to happen. What my mother said, and what my sister and I listened to over the phone, was the same thing people always say in these situations: But can’t you do something. You have to do something. Isn’t there something you can do. Why aren’t you doing anything. What are you going to do. Why can’t you do something. Why is he just lying there. Why aren’t you taking him into the operating room. Why can’t you get his heart beating. Why isn’t he breathing. Why is he so pale. And finally I called to her. I spoke to her gently at first. I spoke to her more loudly, and finally she heard me. I told her to hang up the phone. I told her to go be with him. I told her to go say goodbye.
I stared at Leo in the N.I.C.U. and could not help but imagine the length of his own obituary if I were forced to write it. As I watched him, I heard involuntary words in my head which would describe the short life he had experienced in this world and how little of it he had known, nothing of physical beauty, fresh air, trees, animals, water, and the brilliance of the sun and snow on the mountains: He had known nothing of the world but the sound of our voices, the smell of our skin and sweat and the words of the song I sang to him while feeding him. And I realized: It was still a life, what little he had lived; it was still full of heart and feeling and it was worth it, even if it was all he would ever know. I held him, I knew him, and I realized, then, how much I loved him.
One by one, they moved the infected infants out of the room and into the separate P.I.C.U. wing where I wandered and heard the sounds of pediatric psychosis, where the babies were kept in individual containment rooms until their bodies either survived the virus, or did not. I did not know what happened to the Hipster Parents’ baby; I never saw them again. I did not know what happened to the girl, Sarah, daughter of the teenager parents I had called in my mind the Mennonite Family; I never saw them again. All I knew is they had been taken from our room and into another, to wait. And we waited, and sitting there by Leo’s side, I had all the time in the world to think—and wait—and I had a conversation in my head with my father, now dead these past three months, and I asked him: What would you do, Dad? How would you handle this? And it was obvious to me what he would have said, his voice, there in my head so quickly; he would have said: You need to pray.
I had to release my fear and my desire to control Leo’s fate. I had to know that I could not save him forever, from everything. I had to experience the certainty in my mind that he would die some day, and however little time he had, alive, was worth it. And in my mind, in my own father’s voice, I heard words in the dark garden of Gethsemane, spoken by a son, lost, in search of his own father, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow, to the point of Death, and it broke me: staring into the plastic incubator where my son Leo was calm, awake, watching me. He was watching me. Our silent connection, as I looked into his eyes, predated literacy and language: I was his father and he was my son. I was his protector and he was my son. I would give my life if it meant that he would live, because he was my son. Staring, watching, living there, with him, he looked away.
Leo looked away. He looked at his hands, his feet, the wires running around his body: He examined and judged the entirety of his world, and, watching him, I waited, until he found me again. He watched me, again, as long as he could. I was still there. I was still watching over him. And he watched me.
Minutes later, what must have seemed a lifetime to him, he closed his eyes, and, finally, he slept. Mouth agape, chest rising, hands moving over his belly, his chest, peacefully resting.
Leaning back in my chair, I breathed, I closed my eyes.
I relinquished my fear. I gave up my pain. I surrendered my trust to a higher cause. I released. I had to trust in something greater than anything I could see: He had come to us, his sister had come to us, and we had become a family. If the virus came to him, and he were to die, I would do it all over again, if only to have known him so briefly at all, to have known my son, for so little a time as he had been given to spend with us. If the virus came to him, and he were to suffer and die, all I could ask of anyone is that we might be there, with him, his family, to watch over him, all night long, to protect him. And if his turn did come, we would say to them, together: Please let us stay and hold him till the end.
God is never late, is what my father liked to say. That was his way of counseling me to reserve judgment about the circumstances of our lives. I wanted to find resolution and likewise avoid passing judgment on the painful timing of life and death in our family. God is never late, I thought to myself, mixing a martini and setting it down on the pages I still have here in front of me. But what if God is early. What right do we have, then, to feel anger at his accelerated calendar and overeagerness in our lives. What right do we have, then, and the answer, in flipping this over, is none.
Stepping into the ward, the three nurses turned to me and I saw their bare faces, smiling, without masks or gloves or gowns and I saw we had survived the outbreak. No more Isolation Protocol. Leo was now gaining weight without supplement, regulating his body temperature, and he could now sit in his car seat without any respiratory alarm or cardiac disruption for ninety minutes, what they called the Car Seat Challenge, the final test he needed to pass for discharge and release into our care. He had been there in the hospital, all his life, for twenty-three days. The doctor looked at us, signed the paperwork, and he asked if we would be ready to bring Leo home Saturday May 6, and Emma and I glanced at each other, smiling and shaking our heads; we had the exact same thought at the exact same moment, because we were each other’s best friends, shotgun partners in the saddle. We had survived so much madness and mischief in that wild ride, and so it was: Our son was coming home to us on the morning of the Kentucky Derby, one of our family’s favorite days of the year. And the thought we both shared: Maybe he could use a good racehorse middle name.
After reading my father's autopsy report once, quickly, I forwarded the PDF to a friend of ours who was a cardiologist and thoracic surgeon. I had feared a death sentence, there in those pages, which would have granted me another twenty-two years of life; if my father had died of something genetic which he had then passed onto me, that meant I may have unknowingly passed a genetic condition down to my children and which I would someday have to tell them about: I would have to sit them down and say there’s something wrong with your heart.
But I didn’t.
Nor was it poisonous gas from the fumes of his boat. It wasn’t a single medical condition, exactly, but the culmination of a lifetime of poor physical health and decades of mortal obesity.
Our friend wrote, after receiving the autopsy report and reading its every detail, and texted me with the following note: It appears that your dad died of a ruptured aorta. His heart literally burst. It’s called aortic dissection. His largest artery burst and blood flooded his chest cavity and ceased the normal operations of the heart until bloodflow stopped reaching the brain. But this is not genetic. This is not a specific genetic illness. The factors that may have contributed to this would be his obesity, years of hardened arteries, years of poor diet, no exercise, mineral deficiencies, stress, all the other factors that may contribute to cardiovascular disease, but nothing that applies to you, Leo, or Esmé directly. Your kids will be okay. And you will be okay, too.
For now, it’s enough to just rest and grieve.
S. TREMAINE NELSON is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Columbia University MFA Program. He read fiction at The New Yorker and read poetry at The Paris Review. In 2020, he revived Northwest Review and served as editor-in-chief and publisher for ten issues before reinstalling the journal back at the University of Oregon. He was born, raised, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.