Birth certificates and death certificates are also stories: empirical, clinical. The forms are quite similar. Both documents ask for identifying data: names and dates and times and locations. Both are interested in causality and required by law. Neither document bears our signature. It’s as if we refuse to verify the authenticity of our birth or our death. These documents are said to be essential yet have very little to do with us. The law will accept the signatures of those remote individuals we call parents and the signatures of strangers.
Cooper turned blue. He was the first child of my sister Jeannine and her husband, Paul. He was born on December 16, 1996, and he died on December 23, 1996. Born on a Monday, died the following Monday. He lived for a week, so there’s very little to tell. How much can happen to someone who’s only around for seven days? I’ve been keeping you longer than I intended but this one should be short, I promise.
My mother called here twice in a week. That’s unusual. The first call announced the birth of Cooper; the second, his death. Actually, I think there was a third call, a voicemail left in between the two, where Mom said something was wrong.
For the first couple of days, everything was fine—a boy, a son, a grandchild—but while my sister was in the hospital, she noticed Cooper was a funny color. She asked the nurse about it and the doctors did some tests and then they gave her the prognosis.
Cooper had blue baby syndrome. This syndrome is caused by a heart defect known as Tetralogy of Fallot. It sounds like the name of some medieval knight. The blood doesn’t flow properly, doesn’t receive enough oxygen, which gives blood its redness apparently, hence the blue tinge to the baby’s extremities: lips, fingers, toes. In many instances the condition is treatable, but in this case, due to the complicated structure of Cooper’s heart, and the size of the hole in the two bottom chambers, there was nothing they could do.
After that, things moved quickly. Jeannine and Paul were allowed to take Cooper home. I don’t know how they spent those remaining days, except on the Sunday. According to my mother, they invited everyone over to their house in Hilton to have a barbeque and spend some time with Cooper. The day was a scorcher. Everyone came then everyone left and Cooper died, in the early hours of Monday morning.
The funeral took place just before Christmas. If he died on the twenty-third, it must have been held on Christmas Eve. Can funerals happen at such short notice? Don’t they require planning and advance warning? I wonder if I have the correct dates for Cooper’s birth and his death. Are dates important? Cooper was alive for exactly one week, of this I am certain.
I probably should have thought about flying home, to be there for my sister, but I didn’t even consider it. Remember, I was over nine thousand miles away. I was caught up in my new life.
Mom said the coffin was so small, she couldn’t bear to look at it. Even though it was light, they had four coffin bearers, one on each corner. Because of the coffin’s compact dimensions, the men had to walk close together and kept on bumping into one another.
Which means my mother must have called a fourth time, to tell me about the funeral. Or she mentioned it when I rang to wish her and Dad and my brother Andrew a Merry Christmas.
I only have the vaguest memory of these calls, which might explain my poor grasp of key details, but I do remember that during one, I was taken back to the morning Mom came into the kitchen to tell me about Gran. The same abstract mystery was being presented to me. Except now we weren’t in the same room and I was a grown man and we were talking about an infant, not an old lady, and it was me who was on the opposite side of the world.
I also recall how the tenor of my mother’s voice changed over the course of that week. At first it was breathy and excited; during the second call, it was hesitant and full of pauses; by the fourth call, her voice had fractured until it broke off in two.
Some photos of Cooper came in the mail (which raises the question: Did I learn some of this narrative by way of my mother’s letters, her spidery handwriting, rather than through the tremors of her voice?).
A few were taken at the hospital, before anyone was aware of his heart condition. In those pictures Cooper is pink and wrinkled and looks perplexed, like all babies do. Whoever’s holding him—Jeannine, my mother, Paul, my father—looks euphoric, overjoyed.
But then there are the photos taken later, that Sunday at my sister’s house, in the shade of a jacaranda tree in the backyard. Although the location provides a clue, you can tell by the . . . shredded expressions on people’s faces that the situation has shifted. Everyone knows what’s going to happen.
Surely one of the most joyous aspects of the arrival of a newborn is the uncertainty of their fate. But when their fate has been decided, from the get-go, surely this is unbearable.
As members of my family hold Cooper and pose for whoever took these snapshots, they’re smiling, but their eyes are red. Some are weeping. Others are attempting to hide their grief but are unable to.
Cooper is no longer pink; his skin is as blue as the pale-blue crocheted blanket he’s wrapped in, and slightly purplish, like the stray jacaranda flowers that have fallen on his head.
And his expression has changed. While the adults are tearing up, their features torn apart by what they’re . . . feeling, he is, at least on the surface—the surface of the photograph and the surface of his skin—impassive, stoic. Everything about him is unreadable, yet he appears to have acquired a certain . . . erudition.
We want existence to drag on and on, so that it trails behind us, like those demons who are said to prey on pregnant women and whose entrails drag behind them, but perhaps seven days is enough. Perhaps, in that swift transition from womb to world to coffin, from the pink void to the bright void to the void that we presume will be black, you can experience every aspect of existence, you can learn an awful lot, possibly all there is to know.
I still have those photos. They’re in this beat-up little metal lunchbox, where I keep other pictures and postcards and letters. I haven’t looked at them in years. I don’t think I care to.
Cooper’s death was like one of those fairy tales I devoured as a kid, in which no one is safe from evil or harm: There was a newborn child, and a witch came along and placed a curse on him, and over the course of a week, the child turned the loveliest shade of blue, and by the end of the week, he was old . . .
Or a story from the Old Testament: She prayed to God that her firstborn be a son and be beautiful, and in his goodness God gave her a beautiful son, and then he decided to test her . . .
I suspect you have to be pretty strong to deal with something like this. To get through it. My sister was. I can’t imagine what it was like, carrying this being inside you for nine months, and then he finally arrives and you’re elated, you have his tender body in your arms, and then in just over a week you’re burying your firstborn in a hole in the ground, while he’s still warm; you can feel the trace of him turning and flipping inside of you. You still recall the preternatural sensation of him . . . occupying you. And now you’re a void. How do you pull yourself out of such sadness?
How do you keep from going mad over such a thing?
Jeannine and I talked about Cooper, around six months after his death, when I was back home for a visit. The trip was meant to last for only three weeks, and although I was not enjoying myself, I kept changing my return date; for a while I was not clear if I was going to come back to Los Angeles at all, but for some reason I did.
I had been staying with my parents, but that night I stayed at Jeannine and Paul’s house. As we sat on the porch, Jeannine brought up Cooper’s last night. I like to think that I introduced the topic, asked her how she was doing. She said the day never cooled down, and that she and Paul sat outside so Cooper could hear the evening sounds, the cicadas and birds, see the stars, cram in a little more experience.
She said they were ready to have another baby. My sister was filled with trepidation but she told me she had a dream, not long after Cooper died, where she was in a plane crash. The plane crashed into the sea, near the shore, and everyone drowned except for her: she emerged from the aircraft wearing one of my mom’s cotton nighties, blue as Cooper’s skin, and waded back to shore, safe and sound. When she woke up somehow she knew it would be okay.
She and Paul have three boys now: Remy, Marley, Fyfe. From the photos she sends me, they appear to have Paul’s long limbs and Jeannine’s soft features, which are the features of my mother. My sister’s interpretation of her dream was accurate.
I haven’t heard Jeannine refer to Cooper since that conversation. I could call her right now and ask her to verify some details but I don’t want to do that. That would be unfeeling. She must think about him. She must dream of him, incessantly, relentlessly, of what he didn’t become.
Perhaps she keeps his birth and death certificates in a shoebox in a closet, pulls them out occasionally when no one is home. She takes off the paper clip that keeps them together and examines the documents issued in consecutive weeks: these vital records are so similar, you can hardly tell them apart; they’re yellowing at the same pace, though she notices the birth certificate is slightly yellower.
And, every now and then, she slips away from work at the library and visits Cooper’s grave at the Fremantle Cemetery.
Jeannine knows the way to his grave like the palm of her hand. She stands there graveside and wonders what her son is up to. She stares at the headstone, which is already weathered; reading those dates of his birth and his death, as close together as the shoulders of the pallbearers, she feels like she’s regarding one of those old graves in the cemetery, from the nineteenth century, when babies were always dying early.
I’ve gone to the cemetery’s website to locate his grave, but it produces no results. I’ve thought about that grave’s compact dimensions. In theoretical physics there is a theory of the same name: A compact dimension is curled up in itself and very small. Anything moving along this dimension’s direction would return to its starting point, almost instantaneously. The dimension is smaller than the smallest particle and cannot be observed by conventional means.
I don’t understand this theory, and Wikipedia claims the article cites no sources and can therefore be challenged and removed, but I know it pertains to Cooper, curled up in himself, and so small.
Cooper’s death—all death—remains an abstraction, but all abstractions, no matter how mysterious, turn into sorrow. Do you think my sister cries by his grave or does she know that the dead have no time or patience for our tears? She must talk to him. Talk more frankly than she does to her three boys. There are no transcripts of these conversations, but I reckon she’s like me, she believes life gets in the way of real intimacy; it’s only in death that you can get to know someone.
Maybe my sister is more connected to Cooper than her other sons.
And maybe she still sees him. That night on the porch, Paul went inside to get some food and Jeannine whispered, “Do you want to know something?”
“Sure,” I said.
Before confiding in me, my sister, whom I resemble more than any of my other siblings, made me promise not to tell a living soul. I think it’s okay to tell you. You seem like a person who’s pretty good at keeping secrets.
“I can feel him around the house,” she said, looking around and then looking into the night. “Especially on the porch. I’ve even see him a few times out here; he gives off this blue glow, and I try to hold him, comfort him, but he won’t let me, or it’s not physically possible, because how can you hold, grasp something ungraspable?”