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Tales from the Other Side of Language 55 the floor firmly. She is surprised. Standing with both feet, still held strongly in my arms, she takes the first challenging and magical step onto the floor. Neither mother nor staff can believe it’s happening. Mother walks the IV pole beside us, and I support the toddler’s walk down the hallway. They practice in the following days, both delighting in this milestone. A kind of robust health is taking place between them that helps sturdy them in facing the illness issues more securely. Early development is a powerful force, a driver for change, and I use it here. Infants, at the get-go, love novelty. The developing brain recognizes the familiar and then chooses the new. A related interest is variety. They are the way the brain develops. Variety is also how my brain is developing, seeing art in museums, looking at the world visually—people’s costuming, the way vegetables are laid out, the light flowing across the violets in my lawn this morning. Variety is also sensing something more about the non-verbal here with these babies, the sense of a baby’s vitality, how much communication there is in them, the visual, sensory quality of it. Variety and pleasure in whatever I am doing makes my rush to return to the verbal world much more tolerable. They make my stay here in the inbetween world richly engrossing. At Parsons I feel the visual sensations of the paint moving across the paper, and the feeling comes with me as I watch each baby and mother struggle across a canvas of life and death. The layers of grief in my own body find affinities with a mother’s anguish in holding life for her baby. I can’t clearly articulate any of this yet, but I’m beginning to sense how my body’s limitations help me see. I scrub and gown-up to be sterile to go into a reverse isolation unit to be with a baby boy who was born with no immune system. To keep him alive he is being protected from the world’s germs and viruses in this sterile little room. Today he has just had a painful bath. He is crying from the irritation of the water and the cloth washing his rashy delicate skin. The nurse dries him off and wraps a warm blanket around him.
56 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: She gladly hands him off to me, assuring me he will continue his fretful crying. She leaves. I sit in the room’s rocking chair and cuddle him into my body, gently rock him, and begin softly singing. My body remembers how good this feels, a baby tucked warm in my arms. He snuggles into me, softening his chuffing and crying. He quiets as I rock and continue my little songs. I can’t sing since my surgery, but I can sing quietly to him. The sudden quiet alarms the nurse outside who comes to the door: “Is he dead?” Only the ordinary sleep of a peaceful baby. Yehuda tells me it is time for me to attend in the death of one of my baby patients. “An essential initiation,” he says. “You must do this!” A baby’s death is too much to bear, and I am apprehensive. I’m seeing a toddler and his grandmother, showing them both gentle ways to play. It doesn’t help much as he gets sicker and weaker, less able to hold attention to the outside or to toys. His grandmother bonds strongly with me, talks about her passionate desire to see him well. I see his little body bundled up in a little wagon, rag doll arms hanging out as she pulls him around the halls and sometimes lets him sit there outside his room. She so much wants life for him, even the little shreds here in the hall. I too want him to live, but his life is ebbing away, not to be so for either grandmother or me. He is holding this thread of life for her. It is her love and her insistence on life that he holds onto. This is clear to the nurses now. And I see that. He’s very weak. It is time for him to be able to go out of this life. Nurses, a social worker, and I are here in his room with her to support her gently, to help him. She is not ready. She holds him tightly to her breast. One and then another of us take him to hold. I sit beside her, telling her quietly how heroic she has been to mother this baby when her own daughter couldn’t. She alone has given him the gift of mothering. Gradually, very gradually, I speak of how letting him go is the biggest and hardest act of love, not a failure of love. He needs her love in order go; he needs her to say it is OK. Someone hands the baby back to her. She takes a long moment, looks at him carefully, and tells him how very much she loves him—and that it is all right for him to go. She holds herself steady in her love
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We must be willing to give up the l
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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house as sentient. Tales from the O
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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“Without Utterance is a testimoni
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