Day 335 - Jenson Eric: Part 1

My parents have buried three of their five children.

It's disconcerting to say the least.

In my more morbid and morose moments, it makes me wonder if I will be next. And in my more hopeful, pattern-probing, problem-solving moments, I go looking for the answers.

After all, there must be a reason, right??

"What you resist, persists."

- Carl Jung

Jung suggests that what you focus on - whether with negative emotion or positive emotion - is what you will continue to experience.

You could also think of it as the good old debate of...

Is the glass half full?

Or half empty?

If you insist on seeing the glass as half full, then odds are that you experience life as mostly "positive" in many other ways. Or if you contend that the glass is half empty, your experiences are likely to match your "negative" insistence. 

The "fact" is that...

"90% of reality is perception."

- me

To be blunt, death seems like a "half empty" sort of experience.

And when there is a lot of it, well, I start to wonder like most people might...

What is wrong?

So now I'm a little fixated on this rocky, but rhythmic pattern of much too early death in our family.

So much so that I began to wonder if we are being haunted by a grief ghost that still needs to be heard and comforted and loved.  

I decided to go back to the beginning again.

Not of my life this time.

But back to the beginning of this tragic pattern in our family.

I went back to the brother I never knew.

* * * * * 

I have to thank my mom for always being willing to talk and tell her stories.

Even when sometimes the hurt never goes away.

I have often summarized my own beginnings with:

My parents were both raised as conservative Mennonites.

(What's that?)

Well, they are kind of like the Amish, except they drive cars and use electricity.

(Oh, okay)

But they left the church before I was born.

The end.

(Perfect summary, right?)

"Left the church" - what a completely vapid and senseless statement that is.

It really says so little about what that time in their life was like for them.

Really, it went more like this:

Four and a half months after they were married (and still Mennonite), my mom discovered she was pregnant. Delbert was ho-hum about the news as he had been hoping babies would come along a little later, but Mom was ecstatic. 

"After all, this is why I grew up," she told me, "to get married and have babies."

(It made me laugh, but it's not really that funny as it is such a fitting synopsis for her generation of women in the Mennonite church.)

The pregnancy went along fairly well.

Until suddenly and without any understanding, it didn't.

A day of feeling achy and not noticing that her usually active baby wasn't moving.

Followed by a night of terrible cramping and sickness
Until she was forced to face the reality that it was labor and not just an upset stomach.

I asked her what she remembered thinking at the time.

"God just gave me a clear sense 

that I was having my baby, 

he was a boy, and that he would die."

What?? At first, she is moving through the storytelling very matter-of-factly and says this just as if it were simply another string of facts. (Also, this turns out to be another weird pattern. In every single child death my mom has suffered, she has had a death premonition or the sense that God was telling her that her child would die. I'm liking this god less and less.)

"Weren't you panicking?"

"Didn't you think you should call the doctor?"

"What was Delbert doing?"

She was 6 months along and evidently in 1978 this meant that there were very few doctor visits up to this point. They didn't have a number for the on-call doctor and they didn't even know how to get to the hospital that they had planned on using in a nearby town.

Delbert finally says to Mom while she is groaning in the bathroom in pain, "Well, you'd better call the doctor." I can only guess that he decided delegation was the most appropriate action at the time so he could manage the arduous task of getting dressed for the hospital. Either that, or he was shockingly devoid of basic caretaking skills in an emotional and physical crisis. Of course, he was young and he was losing a baby too... 

Meanwhile Mom calls my Aunt Rita (Delbert's sister) who had already birthed three children of her own and she immediately recognized the situation for what it was even over the phone. She told my dad that they did not have time to get to the hospital in Van Wert like they had planned and they needed to leave immediately for the Lima hospital.

Mom gives a billion details which are all fascinating, but we're going to skip ahead to the hospital. Here is the worst of it:

• The water sac is already "crowning" by they time they get there.

• She is rushed to a room when her water breaks. Immediately she feels 10 times better...aaaaand the labor stops.

• Thus enters the brilliant modernity of childbirthing medicine with a pitocin drip at mock TEN. 
• Back to body-ripping agony.

• Eventually, she is whisked off for delivery, only they refuse to let Delbert go back with her.....because he hasn't had the childbirth classes yet.
• She thinks to herself:

Wait a minute!!

I haven't had the classes!

I'm not supposed to be here either!

• They strap her arms and legs down, her body pinned against a hard delivery table and slap a gas mask on her. She panics and does not want to go under, but they force her to breathe in the mask.

• When she wakes up, the doctor tells her,

"Well, you had a little boy

and he died."

• Just like that. As if "it's all over now." As if it was only minimally significant that they had just brutally asserted their medicinal power over her 19-year-old body and ripped her dead baby from her womb and her arms. As if her thoughts and feelings before or after the fact were really of no consequence...after all, life goes on, even when death happens.
• She asks to see the baby and they try to discourage her by saying "oh honey, we can't say no, but he doesn't look very good." Who says that to a mother who just lost her baby?? Fortunately, she has the gumption to insist on seeing him and she was surprised at how perfect he was even at 2lbs 6oz.

• She held her baby and Delbert got to see him as well. Then they took the baby away.

• By law, they were required to have a burial for a baby that advanced in development and by hospital protocol, Mom was not allowed to be discharged in time for his burial. Instead she was put on the maternity ward with lots of other moms who just had alive babies and she got to listen to all of those other babies cry. What a horrible horrible tragedy.

The visiting hours at the hospital were also incredibly strict and so she was forced to be alone much of her mandated stay. The only bitter comic relief to this whole nightmare is that as soon as her family found out, Grandma and my aunt Susan concocted a covert operation to give the visitation police the slip. Two sweet Mennonite ladies, my aunt with a heavy pregnant belly of her own, politely ask for the room number that my mom is in and then casually walk away as if they were going to kill a few hours in the gift shop picking out worldly trinkets. 

Instead, they cast a side eye to the elevators and when the opportunity presented itself with open doors, they sprang into action and discreetly snuck by with all the harmless agility that only two sweet Mennonite ladies can muster. But underneath that docile facade was a mama bear and a big sister who were determined to find their hurting person and hold her broken heart in their arms. 

And this is when my mom stops being so matter-of-fact in her storytelling and fresh tears of remembering well up once again.

Grandma asked Mom if she and Delbert were going to name the baby and Mom said they hadn't even thought about it yet. They had originally planned to name their baby "Hamilton Lee" if he was a boy; "Lee" is my dad's middle name and they both liked "Hamilton." But she said the name just died with him. At the time they told each other they would save the name for the next baby, but it was never again a consideration. Instead, they decided on the name

Jenson Eric

He was born on September 20, 1978.

Unfortunately, at the time, there were no hospital practices in place to commemorate him. So my parents do not have footprints or pictures or even a birth certificate. He had lots of dark curly hair, long perfect fingernails, and his whole hand fit on the pad of my mom's thumb. Years later, my mom's youngest sisters, Carol and Crystal, found a framed print of this Anne Geddes photograph that reminded them of how Mom often described Jenson. When they gave it to her, she burst into tears because the photograph looked so much like the long ago baby she remembered.

But for my young parents, the cloud of grief was still a mysterious fog that had yet to unveil the silent, heavy shadows of loss and need. Mom knew that she had lost a baby, but she still didn't really know what it meant to have a baby. Stranded in no-woman land between marriage and motherhood, she hardly knew what she should do or feel. And sadly, it was quickly evident that her community was not the safest place to navigate this rocky path of grief.

To be continued...