Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

would leave my office after eight hours of being too distracted to accomplish anything, and stop home just long enough to grab our mail, pick grapefruit from our tree for the nurses, and gather flowers from our yard for Liz. I would pick up meatballs, mint chocolate chip ice cream from Baskin Robbins or whatever she was craving at the moment, and deliver it to her hospital room. We ate together, watched shitty television, listened to the music I thought she should hear, entertained guests during visiting hours, and talked on the phone to friends and family about how we were doing.
    Liz was often not up to taking visitors, sometimes because she felt nauseous, other times because she thought she didn’t look cute enough. Instead of telling them not to visit, though, she insisted that I was happy to entertain them, usually just outside of our room, in the lobby of the hospital, or in the cafeteria. When the phone calls became too much for Liz to handle and I grew unwilling to repeat the same mundane story to friends and family all over the world, I decided that I’d update my blog each evening so that everyone had a central source of information whenever they had a question or wanted to know how our baby was doing. It was a website that I’d had for years but rarely posted to—nobody but my mother checked it. Liz thought this was a good alternative to answering the endless stream of calls that flooded our evenings, but she insisted that I not post any photos of her lying in a hospital bed.
    As much as I complained at the time, I was happy to be there with Liz, especially learning things about her that I didn’t yet know. For example, I never knew that her lucky number was seven, or that she considered herself Catholic even though she wasn’t religious. In retrospect, it feels strange that we had never discussed these things before, but in the hospital we had nothing to do but talk. When we were apart, we hadn’t had the luxury of discussing mundane details, as we were in different parts of the world, where conversations were either expensive or difficult to conduct due to the constraints posed by different time zones. And these simple conversations were not urgent; we were looking forward to a long life together during which such details would eventually emerge.
    During our waking hours, when Liz was most worried, I put on a smile, used a confident tone, and assured her that everything would be okay as I sat next to her in her hospital bed, softly stroking her IV-free arm. “Our baby will be perfect…she has you as a mother.” That always brought a smile to her face. When she’d finally fall asleep, I’d sit on that back-ruining foldout chair and worry about how things would turn out. Yeah, she was going to have Liz as a mother, but she was going to have me as a father, and that couldn’t be good. I’d felt fairly sure of myself over the last seven months, but now that our child was closer to being born, I was far less certain that I’d be a good parent. More worrisome for our baby in the short term, however, was the unknown: her health. We had no idea what was really going on inside Liz’s womb, and this early in the pregnancy we didn’t want to know—really knowing could only come after delivery and it was too early.
    Liz had seemed so confident of the health of our child, but after she entered the hospital her entire outlook changed. She was visibly worried, looking ashen and sad when we were alone. It was quite a reversal of roles for us. I had always been the pessimist in our relationship while Liz was the optimist. But a lot of the concerns she had early in her pregnancy were no longer the stuff of ob-gyn warnings; now they were very real possibilities.
    While in the hospital, she had been reading a book about premature babies. One night she was so fed up with the negativity spewing forth from its pages that she sat up straight in her hospital bed and threw it to the other end of the room. “Fuck this