Survivors: Party of Two
This week, Suzy Sullivan writes with brutal honesty about a moment in motherhood that would change her life forever.
(Please note: This story details infant loss and may be triggering for some readers.)
“Mrs. Sullivan, congratulations. You have a beautiful baby boy.”
“Wait What? A beautiful baby boy? What about my other beautiful baby boy?”
“I’m so sorry. He didn’t make it.”
I glance up at the whiteboard: Sullivan Twins A and B.
“There were two heartbeats all morning! This makes no sense. How is this possible?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Which one made it? I need to know! Was it twin A or twin B? Was it twin A or B? Which is A and which is B? Is A the lower right and B the upper left? I need to know which one is which! Which one is still alive?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll check.”
Max Yves Laplanche was the lower right. The kicker. The A Game. And Luc Patrick Laplanche, the upper left. The roller. Called B. But I don’t know them as letters. They have names. They have souls. I know—and love—each one intimately.
A nurse shortly brings me a puffy and blue Luc, swaddled and compact, breathless and still. She asks if I’d like to hold him, to say goodbye. “Of course,” I say. I am reeling ... and slowly dying myself, it turns out, unbeknownst to those who should have known two weeks before when I was so visibly ill and begging them to deliver my babies NOW!
Still in the OR, everything is turning murky and swirly. I try to say goodbye to Luc, his eyes closed shut, no longer needing to see. We are both in some kind of Netherland.
Luc, you were here an hour ago. Where are you now?
Then they sedate me.
I wake up in recovery, and my husband is in a bed next to me. “What are you doing here?”
“I fainted when they announced that one of our babies was dead.”
“Oh, Lord.”
My mother is standing by my side, so full of love and compassion. She’s deeply religious and tries to console me.
“Sue,” she says, holding my hand, “Luc is in heaven. He’s in peace.”
“Ok, Mom.”
Meanwhile, nobody brings Max to me. I’m eventually told that he had gotten a one on the Apgar and is in neonatal intensive care. Later that evening, they would ask if I would like to visit him and hold him? “Of course,” I say, and my husband wheels me in. I hold my newborn, hoping this is not another goodbye. He’s not blue or puffy. He’s pink and resting. He’s swaddled and compact but breathing. He’s of this world. Max, you were here an hour ago, and you’re still here. You made it.
I’m wheeled back out to my hospital bed in the maternity ward to spend a night like no other. No one is yet the wiser of my state. This is when time stops and the fog rolls in.
As does my father. I see him come through my window. I feel him sit by my left side and hear him whisper that’s alright in a wispy, croaky voice. Just those two words, over and over, like a steady heartbeat, beating at a murmur that only I could hear.
Dad, if you’re a spirit, I think to him in our silent language, why did you have to come through a window? Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed. And then your choice of pronoun? Why that’s alright rather than it’s alright? Why the nuance?
Then Mrs. DeSessa and Mr. Carven appear at the foot of my bed, my two best friends’ deceased parents. They just appear. Just like that. They don’t speak to me or to each other. Then they both just disappear.
These images are indelible. I don’t know what they mean. And I don’t care if they are really real since to me they are. The word soul exists for a reason, I reason. For reasons like this.
The bloodwork finally comes back. I’m diagnosed with acute fatty liver of pregnancy. That’s when the doctors call my husband and tell him that I probably won’t make it through the night and that he should come back immediately.
I had gone a full 38 weeks with twin boys. My umbilicus had ruptured and my abdomen, split. I had turned yellow and was spewing green bile. Still, the covering doctor would not take me. I had to wait another week for my doctor to come back from vacation in California.
I’m finally transferred to the ICU. I’m feeling in and out flee flowy, being wheeled around, under various ceilings and through automated doors with a soundscape of beeps and swooshes and the hum of mumbling. Then I’m hoisted—three two one—onto a landing pad and left behind a curtain to stare at nothing, wondering and wandering. Until the beeps and mumbles come back to shove a tube through my nose and down my throat and into my stomach and why I have no idea. The blood brigade comes in to stick me while hanging bags of healthy plasma on poles beside my bed. I am not consulted. I am not privy to the plan. They leave to go about their rounds, pulling the curtains closed again in a careless one-two gesture. I’m left, bereft. Please leave them open so I have something to see.
I’m more and more in La La Land. I’m in a diner in Brooklyn. There’s the counter; the waitresses are rushing back and forth; those white coats must be the busboys. The dings from the busy kitchen are non-stop. The disease is having a field day with my brain.
At night, I hear waves of groaning from neighboring curtains, left and right, and then loud music from afar. I call the nurse. “Have you no respect? We’re trying to sleep in here. Do you know what time it is?”
They don’t care, just passing time with a boom box in the ICU, where most patients won’t see the next light of day. It turns out that I’m still touch and go but the last to know. The service here is horrible. Can’t even get ice chips.
I am obsessed with Saddam Hussein. When my friend Lois sneaks into intensive care pretending to be my sister, I ask her about Saddam Hussein. “Is he still alive?”
“Susie, you’re between life and death yourself. And you just lost a baby. Why do you care so much about Saddam Hussein?”
“I don’t know. I just seem to remember that he matters. Is he still alive?”
When my husband, Jean-Pierre, brings my three-year-old daughter to visit, Madeleine delights in playing with the buttons that adjust my bed settings. I, too, am delighted. I’m confined to bed, so I love that she is making me go up and down and back and forth. Jean-Pierre, AKA Scrooge, is scowling and scolding. “Stop that, Madeleine! Your mother is very sick.”
“No, YOU stop being such a deadbeat, Jean-Pierre. Can’t you see we’re having fun? Have you ever heard of fun?”
When my brother calls and the nurse holds the phone up for me, I say, “Craig. I’m sorry. I can’t talk now. I’m talking to Daddy.” Craig’s response: “Well, that’s all well and fine, but if he asks you to go with him, tell him no.” Ha! Hurts to laugh but feels so good!
When another nurse finally brings Max down from neonatal so I can give him a bottle for the first time, I panic as she hands him to me and leaves me alone. I’m so weak. I’m petrified I might drop him to the floor and see his skull split open. I keep calling the nurse’s station but no one answers. She’s probably out smoking and listening to her boom box. I summon all my strength to protect his little head. It hurts to cry, too.
When I develop some kind of obstruction, the gastro guys alight with hopes of cutting me open again. The nurses say: “Don’t trust them. It will resolve itself.” So I politely decline.
When I experience bradycardia and my heart stops beating for long stretches until being jolted back, the cardio guys alight with hopes of cutting me open again. The nurses say: “Don’t let them near you. They’re butchers.” I decline again.
Then there’s the priest. Every day he pops in, and every day I say, “No thank you.” I think he’s there to deliver my last rites. “I’m not ready, Father.” Forever declining.
On one of the last days, he says, “Mrs. Sullivan. I don’t think you understand. If you don’t decide on a proper burial, your son will be sent to Potter’s Field in Staten Island. I would think you would want a proper burial.”
“Proper? Burial? Oh, Father, I’m so sorry. I didn't understand why you’ve been visiting me every day. Of course, I want a proper burial for my son.”
Reality is coming into focus. It’s simmering just below staggering.
A funeral home rep comes to visit me while I’m still in ICU. He gently walks me through the process. He shows me glossy photos of infant coffins and talks grave markers.
“I’m not sure I want a cross on my son’s grave,” I say. These were new words to me since my new life required new words.
“Well, if you want him buried in a Catholic cemetery, there will have to be a cross.”
“Well, I’ll have to think about it. I’ll get back to you.”
The nurses give me a phone. I call St. Rose of Lima, where I went to grade school and where I got married, but they promptly dash my hopes of keeping my son close to home. “No room at the inn,” snapped the nun. I’m stunned by her callous disregard. My mother finds a “lovely plot” in a cemetery down the shore near Spring Lake, where she grew up and where she lives now. “He’ll be so close to you, Mom. I love you so much.”
My mother later gives me a Polaroid of a swaddled stillborn and a clipped lock of hair. I guess this is the customary care package given by nurses to grieving parents. It’s thoughtful of those who are no strangers to death.
I turn the corner. No more curtain calls for me. Off to the the cardiac unit for a night to make sure I’m not going to join Luc. I bum a cigarette from my sister to sneak smoke in the bathroom. I pull it off. No alarm bells! And the next day I’m released. To go home. With one child.
My husband, though, is not available to take us home. He says he has to work. So my sister drives us. I walk through the door with Max in my arms. I warm a bottle since I’m not allowed to nurse. All my fluids had been poisoned by the disease, so my mother’s milk was circumspect. Oh phooey. I love nursing. But it’s not about what I love. It’s about whom I love.
I settle in with Max. Thankfully, Lois has come in and removed the second crib and the double stroller but not the bib that says Luc. It’s not as if he never existed.
A month or so later, I feel the need to nurse. The milk flows. Happy days! A month or so after that, I trick my husband into another pregnancy, hopefully, to give Max a brother. I succeed, though Jean-Pierre, and our windbag of a new marriage counselor, are strongly lobbying for an abortion.
“Your marriage can’t even sustain two children much less three,” asserts the windbag.
“It’ll be such a hassle to get a restaurant table for five,” complains the Scrooge.
“Go fuck yourselves,” I say to those who say no more lives allowed.
I have the easiest pregnancy of my life, and Harry is born without a hitch. He has a nine on the Apgar, and I’m kicked out of the hospital the very next day since I was caught smoking in the bathroom with my morphine drip still attached. Times have changed vis a vis smoking in hospital rooms. Times have changed all around as times are wont to do. I’m glad times have changed. I’m glad Max has a twinnish brother. I’m glad I’ll be going home with one more baby to make them three.
I don’t care who takes me home. I’m just glad to be there. With my Mad, Max, and Harry.
As a born linguist, Suzanne have been reading, writing, and teaching language since Kindergarten. She’s also lived a life of stories. She’ll be sharing more of them on her own Substack, which you can follow here.
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Hey Catherine from Darcey’s Memoir class! Thanks so much for your comment. Yeah. Tough stuff. We live it. We relive it. We write it. We share it. If we’re lucky, we find kindred spirits who may care about it. Apparently , we both have. Yea for us! Party on!
This essay tells what every writer needs to know: being totally vulnerable and courageous on the page makes a reader relate on the deepest level. The writer shines a bright light on how to manage the hardest pain by navigating the narrow path to survival, starting with a smoke in the hospital bathroom that flies in the face of convention. What better way to tell the world "I am HERE and so was my lost boy! I am going to keep living for both of us!" Thanks, Suzy for this brave, beautiful piece. Wisdom & Words indeed....