Remembering Autumn: Foxes Weeping
When Autumn was born, we brought our own blanket from home to wrap her in.
I woke up in the middle of the night: my water had begun to trickle out after being so close to breaking for three days. I didn’t wake up Aaron, because I knew there was time. I took myself off of bedrest because it didn’t matter anymore. And then I did what many parents do right before going into labor: I went into a nesting frenzy. But I knew we would not be bringing Autumn home alive. There was no nursery to prepare. She would be too small for the onesies I had already bought for her, or even for her brother’s newborn-size onesies. She didn’t need diapers or a coat or a carseat. But I wanted to nurture her out of my body as I had tried to inside before my body failed. I wanted to give her something since I could not give her life.
But what does a baby born too soon with no hope to live need? She would need to be wrapped in love until her little heart stopped beating.
Hospitals have delivery blankets, but I had already been in labor and delivery earlier that week and everything was an annoying pastel pink or blue. Even the contraction monitors. We did not yet know if Autumn would be a girl or a boy, but I knew I wanted more for her little existence than ugly pastels. So I decided we could bring her a blanket from home.
With our living child, we never used receiving blankets. We had a few beautiful, handmade quilts to lay him on. We wrapped him in swaddles, which were much bigger than receiving blankets. We had beautiful knit and crocheted blankets that we use more now that he’s older to keep him warm in our drafty old house. But we still had some of his unused receiving blankets, and they were the right size to swaddle a too-small baby. I don’t know which receiving blanket I was looking for, but there I was, in the dark, holding my belly with one hand and searching through a trunk of blankets with the other. I fished out a white one with little foxes on it. Later, once we got to the hospital, I looked at the foxes and thought of her eldest sibling, my first lost baby.
That first of Autumn’s siblings was conceived after fourteen long months of trying for a baby. We found out at the end of January 2016 when the baby was measuring big enough to have been conceived around Christmas. We were due September 21. We heard the baby’s heartbeat. And still, because of our fourteen months of infertility (which now, I see as such a short journey), I was guarded. When we went for ultrasounds (and we had multiple even so early in pregnancy), I felt like I was watching someone else’s body. I was afraid of touching my belly. I thought it was too good to be true. And it was. I started cramping and bleeding on Mardi Gras, and by the next day, which was February 10, my husband’s 29th birthday, our baby was gone.
But in those moments I knew I was losing the baby, I tried to cram all the love I was too afraid to give when we first discovered the pregnancy into those last moments as I lost the baby. The one children's book we had on our living-room shelf was Le Petit Prince from when Aaron and I read it in our high school French class. So I read, our loud, in stilted, clumsy French. I read about sheep and roses, boas and baobabs, and I read about a fox who taught the Little Prince about the goodness of love even if it ends in goodbye.
[So t]he little prince tamed the fox. And when the time to leave was near:
“Ah!” the fox said. “I shall weep.”
“It’s your own fault,” the little prince said. “I never wanted to do you any harm, but you insisted that I tame you . . .”
“Yes, of course,” the fox said.
“But you’re going to weep!” said the little prince.
“Yes, of course,” the fox said.
“Then you get nothing out of it?”
“I get something,” the fox said, “because of the color of the wheat.”
But what is the point of love, what do we get out of it, in the words of the Little Prince, when it ends with such a senseless goodbye? Some days still I am so bitter I wonder if anything good could be said of Autumn's life. I even asked this question when we scattered her ashes, but I answered it then too. When I was pregnant with Autumn, I would walk up the hill at our house with my hand on my belly, following after our living child, and the farm seemed so much more beautiful. At night sometimes all four of us would pile into bed and read Harry Potter or have a pillow fight that would end in the best of snuggles. We got something.
Some days that still isn't enough to make a dent in the bitterness. But I never asked what was the point of loving Autumn's eldest lost sibling, who we called Christmas after we lost them. As awful as that loss was, it brought Aaron and I together even closer: that baby, even lost, made us parents. Our Christmas baby showed us the power of love, even a love crammed into the last possible moment.
Maybe one day I will feel that way about Autumn too, trusting in the power of love crammed into 118 days between a frozen embryo transfer and a doomed birth. Maybe that is the promise of the fox blanket: that love is not nothing. Love gives something.
