Free Holding Silvan by Monica Wesolowska

words they speak are to each other. Perhaps they will be less self-conscious once they get him home alone but I doubt it. Although they were told weeks before that he was ready, the mother is afraid. Afraid that he will choke on his food at home and die. Perhaps he is brain damaged too. I smile at them and turn to my baby who will never go home.

    With Silvan on Kim’s lap, I find I can reach his little face through his equipment more easily than I can when he’s on my own. I bend to kiss his forehead, then his nose, then the space by his ear that is free of medical tape. And then I cannot stop. I kiss the front of his neck below the breathing tube, those warm wrinkles, and the side of his neck, so smooth, so smooth, and his shoulder, and the creases at the edge of his armpit and across his naked sternum and down towards his belly button, all the while making smacking noises, eating him up.
    When I raise my head I am renewed as if, after hours on the trail, I have found water. But Kim is inscrutable. A distant smile on his face. I think of the kisses I gave him , kisses just like these, when he was a baby newly arrived from Korea. I think of his birth mother, too, wondering if she kissed him like this, the newborn she was about to let go. If so, I feel linked to her pain.
    The mother and grandmother at the next crib stare in surprise.
    â€œThat was quite a kiss,” the grandmother says.
    â€œWell, once I started I couldn’t stop,” I say.
    My time is limited. This is a mother’s love distilled.
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    â€œSOME PARENTS TAKE weeks and weeks to make this decision,” Nurse Kerry says in praise, standing with us in the door to his little room. Nothing has changed. Or rather, we have stopped the flow of phenobarbital and Silvan has carried on. We’d thought he might die of a seizure; now we are relieved that he has not.
    Nurse Kerry is a new nurse, very young, and this is her first terminal baby; she is sweetly emotional, her fresh young skin flushes pink and her big eyes gleam with tears as she talks. Dr. A has secured this tiny private room for us so that we don’t have to suffer the extremity of our grief in the middle of the nursery floor. “And don’t forget,” she says, “there’s always morphine to make this easier.”
    For a moment, I think she is speaking in code. I think: At last, here is someone who will help him die more easily . For I am
still in shock that not feeding him is an option. I’m hoping we don’t have to go that far. I’m hoping nature will be merciful.
    Whatever she reads on my face, she blushes, says, “I mean, to make him comfortable.”
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    EVEN IN HIS coma, Silvan seems uncomfortable. He has begun tugging with a hand at his breathing tube. Some babies have been known to “extubate” themselves this way. Seeing that little hand tug, I’m frantic and aching to give him this simple relief, even if it means he will die, right then and there, in my lap.
    I arrive in the morning prepared. Silvan is six days old.
    But it turns out that sometime in the night, our private room has been given away to a contagious baby. Now they’re cleaning the room to give back to Silvan before they extubate him. I’m frantic to be with him, to relieve him, to know if he will die or live. But we’re stuck outside in the hallway. My mother is pacing with her rosary and Sister C when my nerves are at their frazzled worst. If Silvan has been baptized by now, I don’t ask. Instead, I swear in front of Sister C – “They’re taking so goddamned long to clean the room,” I say, before clapping my hand over my mouth – but Sister C is, of course, unfazed by my swearing and eager to help. She rushes off to see if she can speed the process.
    At last the room is ready. I sit in the rocking chair. Someone transfers Silvan to my lap. Gently, gently, Nurse Kerry peels away the tape that’s been holding the