Emma Hansen - Still: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Motherhood

Copyright 2020 by Emma Hansen

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Greystone Books Ltd.

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-391-7 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-77164-392-4 (epub)

Editing by Paula Ayer

Copyediting by Antonia Banyard

Proofreading by Jennifer Stewart

Cover and text design by Belle Wuthrich

Cover artwork by Alana Hansen

The Waking, copyright 1966 and renewed 1994 by Beatrice Lushington; from Collected Poems by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

For Aaron and Everett

In honor, celebration, and memory of Reid

THIS IS MY story, as I remember it, allowing that time and grief have rendered some memories unreachable. Some events have been compressed or reordered; conversations have been reconstructed from memory. Passages from my blog and social media have been incorporated to stay true to the grief of those seasons. Some names have been changed to protect the anonymity of those persons, and some have been kept as they are in real life. I acknowledge that if your gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, experiences, or beliefs are different than mine, what is written on these pages might not always resonate. If this is true, I say: I see you, your story is important in its differences and similarities, and I hope you feel supported by this book as a whole. In all ways, I have attempted to honor the roles that the members of my far-reaching community have had in my journey. I write with gratitude for these connections. Though this is my story, I am not alone in it.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

THEODORE ROETHKE, The Waking

Prologue

I SEE HIM AGAIN in November. Its the first time. The little gray-and-white chevron cardigan wed bought for him is still rolled up at the wrists. His hat sits a little too far back on his head, letting wisps of black hair escape from underneath. His cheeks are flushed red through his porcelain skin.

I walk toward him, through the crisp winter air, through the backyard of my childhood home. I circle the edge of the pool and notice the muddle of leaves and worms sitting in its depths. The grand Douglas fir stands tall at the back of the yard, but the shrubs growing wildly around it are naked in their state of rest. Under the canopy of the fir, in the spot next to the large, wayward root where our late dog Magnus used to lie, Reid sits in his car seat, eyes closed. Even though time has passed, he is still a newborn, as he was that single day in April when we gazed upon his face. All evidence of his passing has been erased. Im dreaming, of course Im dreaming, but it feels more real than anything Ive experienced before.

I am visiting him, as one visits a grave, and I have brought him a flower, white and blooming in my grasp, its petals dropping as I walk closer to him. It looks like an oleander, beautiful and poisonous, but that cant be right. My sister Alana is with me and she takes photos as I place it softly on his chest.

We leave him and walk inside the long-abandoned home. A waning sun shines through the hall windows, and dust glitters in its beams. We wave our hands in front of us, sending the dust on a dance through the air, and clear a path to the smallest room in the house, the one that was mine for most of our years here. My sister and I sit next to each other on the bed and look through the photos weve taken. Then something captures my attention. When I zoom in for a closer look, I see that Reids eyes are open, and hes looking directly at the camera.

I nearly drop the phone. We jump up and run back to the tree to where hes still sitting, his eyes now wide and focused. My breath catches in my throat. They are a beautiful shade of pale blue.

We swoon over him, taking photos and capturing videos. My dad comes out from the house in his wheelchair and places Reid on his lap, spins him around the pool, looks into his eyes. Then Aaron is there, holding him in the crook of his arm. Just like at his birth, only this time Reid is looking at him too, kicking and stretching his long arms up toward his fathers face. We invite the rest of our family and friendsthe ones who held him seven months earlierand the scene around the pool morphs into a party, everyone talking and laughing and passing Reid back and forth, celebrating that he is here.

Eventually the guests fade away. When the sun finally sets and just the two of us are left, sitting side by side, I sense that its nearly time for him to go. I dont want to move, fearing that the tiniest shift will erase him from my presence. So we sit under the glow of the full moon rising above and our breath paints the air before us. I marvel at how such a simple moment can bring me such joy. I am only sitting in the cold of the night with my son at my side, but he is breathing.

Where have you been? I ask.

Ive been right here. The words come from him, but he doesnt so much speak them to me as into me, and his hand moves to rest over his heart. Ive been near you this whole time.

Do you know how much I love you? I brush his hair up off his forehead.

A smile spreads across his face, revealing a single dimple on his left cheek, like mine.

I NEVER KNOW when Ill sense Reids presence. It isnt in a toothbrush left behind or a frequently worn item of clothing. Its in the absences that I feel him most. Its everywhere that I had imagined hed one day be.

For me, he is more than his body. I knew the soul, not the flesh. When I look at photos of him, I miss him, but not in the same way I miss him when I look at photos of myself pregnant.

He is a feeling. He is a feeling more than anything because of the simple fact that he died before he was born. Because he was stillborn. He is not defined by this, but the definition matters. I was meant to be his portal, the one that would lead him from his world into ours, but he left for another world, one altogether foreign to me. His life was supposed to start with his birth, but I have learned that his story began long before then, just as I have learned that it will continue long after. They were gifts, his life and his death. I never really lived before either.