Breadcrumb #675
SARA TICKANEN
You were 37 weeks when you died inside of me. There one instant and gone the next, and nobody knew you but me. Your entire life, every beat of your heart, fit on a single form that would be used to craft your obituary--a form I clutched in my hand as I hovered above a binder stuffed with urn pictures at a now nameless funeral home. I had to write an obituary and arrange a memorial and pick and urn where you’d rest forever and I wanted to do none of these things. You were gone, dead forever, an irreversible process. I wondered if I would be dead soon.
When I flipped the pages without really seeing them, the funeral director (Coral? Carrie? Cori?) gently said, “Sometimes it’s hard just from photographs to tell which is the best one, to see what you might want to put him in. We have a showroom where--”
I pushed back my chair from the table before she could finish. A showroom. To see what I might want to put him in, like he was a deceased pet I would bury in the backyard. Perhaps the husband came with me; perhaps not. There were coffins suffocating me the instant I crossed the threshold. Coffins in all sizes and colors, from the obvious child size to what was clearly meant for an adult, from white with roses that seemed to sparkle to black with a simple molded border. But you were a baby, too tiny to fit in a coffin. And they wanted to burn you anyway, the husband, this Cori. I’d signed a form in the first five minutes of our meeting stating that cremation was permanent, even though I didn’t want it at all. If we burned you, we could never take it back; an irreversible process. I wanted to bury you. The husband wanted to throw you to the wind, and he always got his way. So you needed an urn, not a box. Where were the urns? It had to be right, this place you’d stay forever, another choice in the irreversible process.
“There were coffins suffocating me the instant I crossed the threshold.”
I wished that you could tell me where you wanted to live forever. That I could take care of you, the way a mother was supposed to, that you would tell me the right way to do that. But you wouldn’t. You would never say any words at all, not to me, not to anyone. I would have to choose for you as the only person who had ever really known you.
Cori drifted in as my finger trailed along the nearest coffin, pulling up a surprising lack of dust, and quietly steered me into a small side room. She began to explain the differences in the urns without my having to ask. The large ones were obviously for adult remains. Those were generally darker shades, blacks and browns and grays, some with stripes, some with gold and silver molding, and some just one solid color. None of those were right.
“Obviously your son was quite small.”
Her words stung, even though she hadn’t meant them that way.
“There are urns smaller than these,” Cori said as we left the adult urns behind. “Urns for babies. But there are also these.” She reached for a lower shelf and grabbed something else to pass to me.
I didn’t see the difference really; it looked like so many of the other tiny urns. Would you like it? Did you have a favorite color? Could you tell me?
“These are special urns. For times when the family members each want to take a piece of the dead home with them. They’re smaller, cheaper, but more decorative.”
It was a morbid thought, dividing up the dead. I put the urn she’d handed me down and squatted to get a closer look at the shelf it had come from. I spotted one I thought I might like, if it was possible to like such a thing. It was a tiny bronze urn with a red satin case shaped like a heart; the urn rested in a small niche inside and the heart closed around it, like a jewelry box I’d filled with pennies as a child and hidden in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It spoke to the child in me, to those memories. Would it speak to the child you would never grow to be?
The idea that I’d be holding you close to my heart echoed in my head, a ridiculous thought, cheesy and sentimental, but the urn had its good points. If someone saw the heart tucked away on a shelf, they would never know there was a dead baby inside it. They would never know it contained all that was left of you.
Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, that they’d never know. That I would be the only one to carry your memory in the years to follow. But maybe, in time, I would never know. And that was worth it to me, that it might not hurt to look at you there someday. “This one.” I didn’t ask the husband’s input. Was he even at the room, or still at the table? Did he care at all? I really was on my own.
Cori took the item number and led me back to the table where we would fill out yet another form. I didn’t really see the words there; it was too much. It didn’t matter, yet it mattered so much. I let everyone else in the room finalize the details without my input and watched as they finalized your death--a permanent, irreversible process.
The day you came home in your red satin heart was the day the 2010 Census form came, and I didn’t know whether to answer two or three people in the household. You’d come home, but not really. You were there, and then gone. You were alive. You were mine. Then you were dead.
An irreversible process.