The Marrow

Attention is the beginning of devotion. –Mary Oliver, Upstream.

Tending to Endings (seventeen)

Last Saturday my twin sons turned twenty-five. I don’t think about my pregnancy story as often as I used to, but during this time of isolation and uncertainty when most of us not on the front lines have orders to stay home (which feels both difficult and not very heroic), it has certainly come to mind.

The boys were due on May 17 of 1995 and I went into preterm labor on January 29, far too early. Their father, my husband at the time, drove me to the hospital, and I was admitted and placed on an IV of magnesium sulfate, a drug that relaxed every muscle in my body to the point where it took effort to lift my hand or move my leg. Only my brain remained unaffected. I stayed aware, worried.

The nurses kept upping the dosage until I could no longer open and close my jaw, until it took effort to make myself blink. Until, finally, the contractions slowed. I watched the sluggish heartbeats of my sons, also affected by the drug, marking slow time on the monitor. I could not take my eyes off of this evidence of life.

It was early in February when I was assigned a home healthcare nurse and sent home with a pump to administer a different medication and orders to to stay in bed full-time. I had been a teacher and a coach and a triathlete. I rode hundreds of miles a week and and ran in the hills for fun. I stayed up late grading papers and planning lessons and creating events for my high school students. In those days, my self-esteem was very much defined by productivity and achievement. Staying in motion was my mental health strategy, the way I managed fear. Now, my babies’ lives were at stake and all I could do to help was to be still and drink water. I would’ve been far more comfortable being ordered to climb Mt. Everest.

I have thought about that time a lot during our Stay-at-Home order, which in Boise is in its 30th day. How impossible it seemed in 1995 to be still during a time that was so wrought with uncertainty. How necessary it was. How much I gained that I didn’t even know would be part of the package. I think of Thoreau, who, in Walden, writes about seeking that kind of clarity:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,…

Sometimes the woods come to us. In fact, in my case spiritual growth almost always shows up looking more like crisis or upheaval than like a pilgrimage or a quest. More like preterm labor or a pandemic.

Not that my days on the couch looked spiritual or productive. In many ways, I was a wreck. I couldn’t think of anything serious or important. I started and abandoned craft projects. I watched reruns of Northern Exposure and made it through most of alphabet-titled detective novels. I spent a lot of time trying not to worry.

But I also loved on my sons knowing this might be all we had. We counted off days waiting for hearts, brains, and lungs to fully form.

Each day, I lived on the couch with my palm on my belly. I held it there for reassurance that they were still with me and also because it was the closest I could get to holding them. I waited for them to kick and watched evidence of limbs move across my expanding skin. I told my sons stories and secrets and I sang them songs. I wanted them to hear my voice as well as my heartbeat. I wanted my sons to feel loved.  

I think about the community I had surrounding me even in that isolation. The boys’ dad brought me news from work and pints of Haagen-Dazs. Friends would drop off groceries and piles of books. My mom flew in from Chicago for a few weeks and we played Scrabble nonstop. The kindness of others provided a lifeline from the outer world while I was preoccupied with this inner one. The womb of the living room, the womb beneath my palm. The babies and I, we were all gestating.

We made it 77 days. At 36-weeks, I was able to turn off the medication, and go for my first walk in three months, along the canal bank. It was a brisk sunny day, the cherry trees were blooming, and I was dizzy with the freedom of being outside. Also my belly was unbelievably huge.

That night, April 18, 1995, Gabe and Dylan were born and I was finally able to hold my sons in my arms. They had hearts and lungs and deep brown eyes and souls I already knew. They were able to come home with us.

I know no other way to get to the marrow without also tasting the fact of death. I don’t mean in the way of daredevils. I don’t need to brush up against danger to know life isn’t permanent. I need only to remember. And to pay attention.

Today my sons are twenty-five and I am fifty-five and all of us are here. Today, I hike up the hill behind my house and pull a deep breath into my lungs. I know that, in the words of Jane Kenyon, one day it will be otherwise. It will be cancer or Covid or Alzheimer’s or something completely unexpected. But today, I hold my palm to the earth. I am here.

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