http://polaroid41.com/let-me-stay/
Tuesday October 1st, 2019 – 10:05am.
On the seventh day of your life I went back outside for the first time. We’d been living in the little yellow second floor bubble of a hospital room since you roared into the world at 5:29am on February 3rd, 2013. Now it was time to go home. I remember leaving our apartment around midnight a week before, trying to get the timing right between contractions to make it down the four flights of stairs. Bruno had gone down ahead of me, carrying my bag and assuring the taxi we were coming. I was alone for a minute and looked back and thought: when we come back here, there will be three of us.
It’s an amazing thing at every birth there is suddenly a whole new person in the room who just moments before wasn’t there at all.
We stepped out into the February cold and strapped you into a borrowed car seat. Our taxi driver, a big tough looking guy, seemed as excited as we were. And we were off ! Down the street and the first left…and we were stopped. There was a giant moving truck blocking the road. The taxi driver hopped out and ordered them out of the way with great authority, “I have a new mother and her baby in my taxi. You will move this truck immediately!” I felt so proud and important.
Pretty soon we were on our way and heading north from the 12th up to the the 19th. It was a Saturday morning and the streets were full of people doing errands, there were Saturday morning markets lining the boulevard. I was marveling at all the colors and movement, so many people, so much noise. My entire world had changed since last Saturday and that tiny little hospital room was big enough to hold it all. It was so surprising to suddenly be confronted with a whole big, busy world outside. I wanted to roll down the window and yell: EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW! DON’T YOU KNOW?! EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!!! I couldn’t understand why they were acting the same.
I kept looking at them all and thinking, “You were babies once. You were all babies once. Your mothers felt like this about you.”
Then we drove past Père Lachaise cemetery and my heart clenched. You were all babies once, too. Little 1800s babies wearing white christening gowns. You were babies once.
Being so close to birth and the beginning of life unexpectedly also brought me close to death. I moved up a (///10///) generation. I moved up in the line. I was no longer the last on the list. Suddenly I could not die because someone needed me more than ever before and at the same time, I have to die before him, that has to be the order, anything else is too unbearable. Not the natural order of things. Children bury their parents. It can’t be the other way around.
Giving birth and witnessing the beginning of life made me more aware of my own mortality.
As Elliot has gotten older, he’s become aware of death and asks me questions about it sometimes. He’s told me on a few occasions that on the day I die he will try to die too because he doesn’t want to live without me. He told me that when I die he will hold his breath until he dies, too. These moments always shake me deep at my core. On the surface I try to stay bright, light, reassuring. I make promises that I can’t keep : “I am going to be here for a long, long time! I’m not going to die until I’m a great grandma and you’re a grandpa and we don’t have to worry because we still have so much living to do!” And inside I am terrified. Terrified of letting him down. Of becoming ill or having an accident, of leaving too soon and leaving an unbearable hole in his heart and in his life. I don’t usually pray but in those moments a silent, fervent prayer fills my heart and head: please let me stay, please let me stay.
