Yesterday someone asked me how my twins are doing. “You have four children, right? The babies must be getting so big.” I get this question less often these days, nearly 16 months after I gave birth to a healthy baby girl and her stillborn twin brother. At the beginning, I got that question all the time, so much that I was afraid to go out in public for fear of receiving unwanted questions. “My baby boy died,” I started to tell people, and their faces instantaneously showed shock and horror.
“Oh, you didn’t want me to be so blunt in my answer?” I want to say. “Next time think twice before you ask the question.”
We have a picture of our boy Gavi hanging on the wall in my bedroom, a portrait made by a wonderfully talented artist. My daughter points to the picture and talks to it. “E-yee,” she says, referring to her older brother. No, that’s not Eli. “Ju-dah? Dah-ya?” She carefully enunciates — in toddler speak — as she tries to pronounce her own name. “No, honey,” I tell her, “That’s not Judah. That’s not Dahlia. That’s baby Gavi. That’s your brother.” I hope she remembers him, in some way, on some level. How it felt to grow inside me together with a playmate, and how she and I are the only people that our Gavi knew in his life that he never lived. How because of her, Gavi was never alone.
I don’t think of my baby Gavi nearly as often as I used to, when the thoughts of my baby boy buried in the ground nearly consumed me, although there are still triggering moments (a high school acquaintance giving birth to stillborn twins, a friend announcing a new pregnancy, a well-meaning but ill-intentioned comment from an older relative, a casual encounter at the Y with a mother and her boy-girl toddler twins).
With every day that passes, this becomes more of a “something that happened to me” rather than something that is still happening. When I do think of it, though, I have trouble finding words to adequately describe the experience of my pregnancy. First, the unadulterated joy at finding out I was pregnant, how amazingly grateful we were that this pregnancy had happened so quickly after the difficult months of fertility struggles that preceded each of my other two pregnancies. Then the slightly overwhelming but still joyful feeling when we found out I was pregnant with twins. “Twins!” we thought. “Twins!” How will we ever cope?
Then there was the nightmare of the summer of 2014, starting with the 20-week ultrasound that first revealed something was wrong with our boy, progressing through countless scans, doctors’ appointments, specialist consults, all the way to the final and fatal diagnosis, suddenly ending with Gavi’s untimely late-term in utero passing at the beginning of September 2014. For Dahlia, the story ended a few weeks later, when I went into precipitous labor at 35 weeks and 5 days, with a known breech baby A and a stillborn baby B. Luckily this wasn’t my first precipitous labor, and I learned enough from my experience of nearly giving birth to my second child in the car. “Call 911,” I told my husband as I woke him at 3:50 in the morning. “Call 911 NOW.” And 43 minutes later, my babies were born via emergency C-section at the local community hospital, my daughter remarkably healthy, my son all too silent and still.
So to the dental hygienist who asked me about my twins, I say, “My daughter is precocious, strong, and beautiful. Remarkably healthy and strong-willed, as 16-month-olds tend to be. My son is at peace, in a way that he was unable to be in his life that was cut too short. As for the rest of us? We are still trying to navigate a complicated emotional aftermath, to find a place for an experience that is appropriate and fitting for our son’s memory but is not all consuming for the rest of our family. With each day that passes, we are becoming more at peace.”
Mindy Levine lives in Sharon, MA, together with her husband of nine years and three living children. She is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Rhode Island. In her spare time, she enjoys swimming, biking, and conducting formal and informal science outreach.
