Palm Sunday

The ICU nurse shows me how to flex my arm and support it with a pillow so that Eleanor’s infant head can rest in the crook of my elbow.
Crook, bend, cheat.
We’ve all been cheated, incomprehensibly.
The unfathomable loss of not one, but two new lives.

Nurse Diane places Eleanor in the fold of my left arm and I reach with my right hand between the feeding tube and the breathing tubes and all these other silent wires hooked like a bomb to this six-pound listless body. (Harmless, except to herself.)
Touch her heart. Still beating. The suck of oxygen from a metal box, soft as a purr, a sleeping baby’s puff. She is just sleeping, still alive, rocking next to identical twin sister Quinn. Donna holds Quinn ~ a first that neither of us ever expected on our list of firsts.

Unintelligible
that only ten days ago, a flushed mama admired not one, but two dimpled chins, one of the unavoidable family traits. The other one hidden, until now.
The dimple, barely visible beneath the tape and brace that holds the tubes that holds the sisters to this world. Donna sniffles, red-faced. “This is so unreal, so unfair, I’m so angry.” I wipe my tears before they drip on Eleanor’s easily startled cheek.

Palm Sunday.
I palm Eleanor’s powder soft head, a brush of reddish brown hair, blonde eyebrows gently arch above eye slits. Eleanor opened her eyes for a moment, once, decades ago. They have a picture that plays over and over on Dad’s computer. Quinn never opened her eyes. They would probably be rich, warm, and aqueous like her mother’s, with epic lashes like Dad’s, lengthened today by his tears.
I wish my hand on her head would make all the difference, would change the course of events, would heal in miracle fashion on this Palm Sunday. But the miracle already occurred, the birth, and besides, it’s not about miracles anymore, just life and death, this Holy Week, there is only life and death.

Incomprehensible. Why?

My pinkie, incapable of being grasped by Eleanor.
This moment, incapable of being understood, this infant, twitching in the fold of my arm, this child, celebrated and anticipated, will never read the “Bobbsey Twin” books I gave her from my childhood collection.

Her mother leaves the ICU room to arrange for the donation of corneas and heart valves. Dad had hoped they could give even more. No end to the sadness.
Big brother Greer has gone home, tired and confused (at 2 and1/2 years old) by this inconceivable conception. If his sisters come home at all, they won’t stay long and he won’t be able to play with them in the new playroom with the checker-squared rubber mat and nursing couch generously angled to be the first thing you see when you walk in the room. Angles, Angels. I don’t understand.

Palm Sunday, rocking chairs, without a squeak, hooked to wires like some futuristic matriarch, hold me and Eleanor and Donna and Quinn. Greer crayoned a picture for each of them that hangs above their tiny beds, labeled with parents’ names. “I didn’t know Alexis’ name was Kathryn. I didn’t know.” Nobody knew. Nobody could anticipate this.

Eleanor looks like she might open her eyes. She coos, twitches, and endears me to her like any other newborn, except for all those wires. Her right wrist rests against my belly button, umbilical bleed, unconceivable loss.

Hello and goodbye in 15 minutes. I whisper Celtic songs in a language I’ll never know. I tell the girls that Nancy and Anne want them to know they love them and wish they could have met them both, before flying out for the funeral. I kiss the mystery of their foreheads. Eleanor’s life was real. Her death is real. Quinn is real. They both are real for the rest of all of our lives. Is this what God meant by Easter?