Holding Silvan Read Online Free PDF

the woman a few chairs down with her swollen face and eyes tilted vacantly up at the TV. She has just come from the Bad News Room, as we now call that room where we met with the neurologist, so I know she’s a fellow sufferer. Now I have to tell Margie how bad the situation is, how this is not something that Silvan will recover from after a few days in hospital the way the babies of friends have always recovered until now. “He was perfectly healthy,” I say. “I had a natural labor, it all seemed totally fine. He came out looking perfect to me.”
    â€œSo what happened?” she asks.
    â€œThey don’t know. He’s got severe hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy,” I say, stumbling over the words, “which basically means he was deprived of oxygen for long enough that his central nervous system was damaged. Maybe there was a clot in his placenta. Or a clot in him. Or maybe he grabbed his own umbilical cord so hard he killed his own brain.”
    â€œA baby can do that?”
    â€œA really strong baby, I guess. He’s very healthy. They keep telling me how healthy he is. His lungs. His heart. They say I took really good care of him in utero.” I look over at the woman watching TV. She isn’t listening to us, but it is too awful, too much like the death of my brother Mark, this inexplicable death by asphyxiation, as if my healthy son has chosen to hang himself. Relatives of the woman watching TV look in through the doorway at Margie and me, then beckon the woman out into the hallway where they huddle miserably under the fall of
bright lights to confer. We are left blessedly alone in the dim, stagnant room.
    I tell Margie what else I don’t know. I tell her that in most cases of severe asphyxia the exact time and cause are never determined. I tell her that, though pregnant women are told that asphyxia “never happens” anymore, it still happens to varying degrees in ten percent of all births. Then I tell her about the range that the neurologist has given us. It is this that is the worst. “He might be so damaged he can’t breathe on his own, or he might be only mildly retarded. He might die in a few days, or he might live with us until we die. And David’s freaking out on me.” This is the first time I talk to someone about how David and I are doing. Since the moment David saw Silvan across the delivery room from me, so like a dying patient surrounded with equipment and doctors, David has been suffering. Now he wants answers. He needs to understand so that he can act. In his anxiety to know what the future holds, we no longer seem to be handling the speed of this car together but have rounded that curve on the highway to find a wall. Our differences are coming out, his desire for certainty and my tolerance of mystery are clashing. “What if my marriage can’t survive this?”
    Margie goes down on one knee by my chair. Her voice is very low and intimate. “I want you to know that no matter what happens,” she says, “we are here for you and David, and that if you have a brain-damaged child, I will love him and my child will love him, I will make my children be Silvan’s friend and we will treat him as part of our family.” Margie is from a big, Catholic family, thirteen children; she knows about family obligation. For a moment, there is no one in the world but us carried along by the force of her speech which is so beautiful and passionate and nearly impossible.
    â€œBut you can’t force someone to love someone else,” I finally say.
    â€œI know,” she says, tears coming.
    My tears come too. I sob, sobbing almost with relief that
we can cry like this together, this friend whom I’ve known only in good times. The most serious conversation I can remember having had with her until this moment is about her unexpected desire to give her child a Catholic baptism even though she no longer practices any religion.