Free Holding Silvan by Monica Wesolowska Page B

his paternal grandmother who has yet to meet him. I’m desperate to find the neurologist to see if this changes the prognosis. Is it too late to reverse the effects of not feeding him?
    â€œI have a son who is dying,” I write in my diary. “I have a son whom I have chosen to let die.” My mind is trying to understand, my mind is searching for patterns.
    During the day, I feel ready. I say it out loud: “I’m ready. I love you. You can go.” But at night, my tune changes. “Don’t go,” I say, leaning over his crib, “until I’m back in the morning” as if he will understand my words and do all he can to make this easy for me.
    If I have faith, if I have hope, it is not that a god will overhear and grant me this wish. It is rather that between us we have some power to do this right, to pay close enough attention that we can let go when we both are ready. I am thinking of my friend Maggy Brown and her mother. I’m thinking of the tender certainty of youth. This was the first Sunday in college, the first delicious day of deciding not to go to church, and Maggy had invited me to spend the day studying with her. Though Maggy seemed so much wilder than me, with her crazy black hair, her boasts of debauchery, she seemed familiar too. She’d come from a big Catholic family in Wisconsin; she liked to drink wine. I accepted her invitation, and we set out from our dorm to find the perfect spot. We found it at the edge of campus, a slope of lush, forgotten grass overflowing into a nature preserve full of spindly, leaning trees. We lay in the dappled shade with our books spread before us and pretended to read about the death of Achilles. Overhead, white clouds swelled. All around us, bees hummed, alighting on the clover flowers, on our books, on our hands and hair as we blossomed.

    â€œMy mother was dying of breast cancer my whole childhood,” Maggy explained to me then, “that’s why I was sent away to a boarding school for wild youth.” So here was someone who’d actually survived my greatest fear, and I listened intently. “She sent for me at school so she could say goodbye, and then she held out until Easter.”
    How moved I was. Though Maggy said she no longer believed in God herself, she believed her mother believed and that, because of this faith, she was able to die when everyone was ready. This was a faith I could embrace, a belief in the power of belief. I told her that I too had lost my faith but I wanted to believe in something greater than ourselves that linked us.
    I found a four-leaf clover then; Maggy found a four-leaf clover; there were lots of four-leaved clovers suddenly, and we made wishes on them.
    We were young and we were going to survive the dying all around us.
    â€œYou’re the first person,” Maggy said, “I’ve ever met who can talk about death. You can deal.”
    I shrugged, hiding my pleasure.
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    FOR MOST OF the morning as I resist rushing straight back to the hospital, we are occupied by the ringing of the phone. Family calls every morning in order, my mother, David’s father, David’s sister. Later in the day, his mother, his stepmother, sometimes my brother. In between, we get calls from the hospital, from outside specialists, from friends. People call from all over the world – how fortunate we feel – Washington D.C., Oregon, even Israel. One friend calls every morning at ten a.m. from New Mexico. The calls are brief but crucial. She lets me do the talking. Her husband has told her he no longer loves her after twenty-one years together and is going to leave her and their newborn baby, but she doesn’t tell me this. For now, she considers the bigger crisis to be mine. She says she just wants to make sure that I get out of bed.
    For my doula, I don’t get out of bed. Her messages sound
angry and impatient. Studies show the consistent, calm presence of another woman can