He quietly explained to me that if we didn’t allow him to insert this permanent pipe in Amiir’s throat, we were making the choice to let him go, and the more he talked on and on in this cold doctor way, the more hysterical I got.
“You’re torturing him! He can’t live like this!”
My husband pulled me into the next room and tried to calm me down. “Mayte. Mayte, maybe if they do this—if they can get him breathing with the machine—”
“Then what? What else?”
We stood there in the empty room, coming to the same terrible place.
“We have to let him go.”
I wanted to grab the words back as soon as they were out of my mouth. Letting him go meant carving a piece from each of our hearts, but now I was the protective Mama Bear alongside the weary Papa Bear. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt my baby anymore, and I told myself that if we loved him enough to let him go, maybe he’d come back to us. Maybe he would find us, the way we had found each other.
Holding each other tight, we agreed: “If they take him off the machine and he can breathe, we keep fighting. If he can’t live without the machine… maybe he’s not supposed to be here.”
We went back in and spoke quietly with the doctors. They tried to reassure and comfort us, tried to tell us this was the right thing to do, but the rightness of it didn’t make it any less bitter. We signed papers and agreed on a time when life support would be removed the next day. They sent me home with painkillers and Valium, and I crawled into a dark sleep. I woke up every three hours during the night to pump breast milk, and I wanted to go to Amiir, but I was terrified to go there again. When we did, it would be over.
When I woke up again, I heard a phone ringing. A moment later, my husband came and said, “It’s done. They took the tubes out.”
“What? No! I’m supposed to be there!”
“I didn’t know if you could handle it.”
“I’m going. Right now. If no one wants to take me, I’ll drive.”
He put his arms around me. Made me stop. In less time than it would have taken me to get there, the phone rang again. He answered it, and then he hung up and said, “He’s gone.”
I lost it. I went in our room and cried and cried. I don’t know what my husband did. A few hours later, our son’s ashes were brought to the house in an urn with three dolphins on it: mama, daddy, and baby. We spent most of the next day huddled together on the couch, crying, touching each other, expressing complete wonder at this beautiful creature who’d just drifted into our lives and then away again. I kept getting up to pump milk.
“You should stop,” he said.
“I can’t.”
My breasts ached, heavy with milk. My hormones were screaming. Every fiber in my body craved the smell of my baby.
I don’t know how long I lay in bed with Amiir’s ashes. All I remember is the hot, hard pain in my breasts and grief as airless and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes I was aware of my husband lying next to me or sitting in a chair, staring at the television. The next day—or maybe it was a few days or a week later or in another lifetime—he came to me and said, “I can’t be here. I have to go.”
He went to play a few gigs and promote the Emancipation album. I stayed in the hollow house, wishing I could die. My breasts felt raw. My nipples started to burn and chafe. The stitches on my belly felt like they were crawling with spiders. I lay on the bed, sweating from fever, shaking from shock and chills. I had an infection. A doctor came. I heard her talking to my husband. Their voices were quiet but tense.
“She needs to go back to the hospital.”
“No. God’s hand is on her. She’ll be fine.”
“If we don’t take care of this, it could cause infertility.”
I sat up and said, “I’m going.”
He didn’t say anything else while I dragged myself up and pulled on pajama pants and a clean shirt.
“Will you come with me?” I asked.
He shook his head, staring straight ahead.
In the hospital, they hooked me to another IV and pumped antibiotics and painkillers into me. The nurses came and put ice on me every two hours. They put salve and compresses on my breasts. After a few days, the pressure subsided, and the milk stopped seeping through the front of my hospital gown. I was sent home.
I sat on the sofa with Mia near the bookshelf that housed the dolphin urn that held Amiir’s ashes. The ashes were everything. Everything was ash.
“Where’s my Vicodin?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll send someone to get you some more.”
Days passed in darkness.
He shook me awake. “Mayte. You have to get up.”
“Why?”
“Oprah’s coming to Paisley. Today. She’ll be there with her crew.”
“No…”
“Yes. You have to do this. You have to get up.”
“Tell her I’m sick. Tell her I can’t.”
“I need you to do this. I told her you’d be with me.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”