Something I wrote for Creative Writing

Prompt was "death scene". I thought it came out well.

There’s a song I’ve got stuck in my head as I watch my premature infant struggle to breathe in the incubator. By Death Cab for Cutie, a song called “What Sarah Said”. It’s got a nice piano backdrop to it, better than the hiss and whir of various machines trying to hold back the inevitable.

My baby is only about the size of my partner’s two fists pressed together. My partner is still recovering from her ordeal. I’m not sure if they’ve told her the percentages, the steady unravel of all these months of expectation and hope. She’ll pull through, the doctors say, but they don’t want to stress her until she has a better handle on remaining with us.

Technically it’s not “my” baby in the sense that I am not a man, I did not insert Tab A into Slot B. But my cousin donated the sperm. More importantly, I’m the one who held my love’s hair back as she threw up from all those days of morning sickness, the one who fetched her toasted seaweed chips and pho from the Asian market downtown when she yearned for them, who rubbed her feet, who picked up the slack of taking care of the two cats and chinchilla. I feel this is pretty much the same amount of involvement as a father has. I was convinced I was okay with being Mommy Number Two.

She’s such a misshapen doll, our baby. We came up with girl names once we knew, but if I start thinking of this little scrap of fading as the name we liked best, I know – just know – that I’m going to break.

This was supposed to be a celebration of life.

“It better not be contractions,” was how she broke the news to me, “but we should get this checked out.”

How I prayed. You’d think a minister’s prayers would hold weight, but then again there is no guarantee that heard prayers will not be denied anyway, for part of some greater scheme. I have to hold onto that.

She waves her little hands feebly. I wonder where she thinks she is. I wonder how much she’ll notice the slip from here to eternity.

I’m not even sure why they bothered putting her in an incubator if they’re so sure she’s not going to make it. I suppose because you have to let them go on their own schedule. You have to try, so you don’t spend the rest of your life wondering if you accidentally blocked a miracle.

My stomach growls, and I am dismayed at such a mundane thing breaking into what is supposed to be tragic. Yet I am not crying. I’m not doing much of anything. I am sitting very still, watching the millimeters’ rise and fall of her little chest, and I have an alternative rock song running through my mind’s ears.

I’m not sure how you love a lump of flesh that will soon become a shoebox’s worth of burial. What earthly good does that love do anyone? All I know is that I do. Maybe it’s best that my partner is not present.

I must tell her myself, when she wakes. I owe it to her.

The fingers stop moving. The breathing dwindles. A lump is a lump is a lump.

And I’m thinking of what Sarah said:

That love is watching someone die.