I was barely 26 years old the day I had to pick out a burial site for my yet-to-be born son. It would have been irresponsible not to.
In the time between the late August 2000 diagnosis that our first child wasn’t likely to live much past birth and the December afternoon that turned the diagnosis into our reality, I found myself in a lot of situations no 26-year-old should ever be in. A dimly lit, musty cemetery office was just one of them.
I look back today at the young man I was back then, and it’s hard to remember who he was. Of all the essential truths and pithy phrases I have heard during my now 50 years on this planet, the one that rings most is this: Ignorance is bliss. Because back then, back before that August diagnosis, I was, indeed, blissfully ignorant. Oh, sure, I knew bad things happened during and after pregnancies. I knew babies died. I knew life was patently unfair and had an utterly remorseless side to it.
But my child? My life?
That 26-year-old young man went to the ultrasound appointment with his 20-week-pregnant wife expecting to see nothing more than a penis — or not-a-penis. He was wholly unprepared to hear a doctor tell him his son, if he was born alive, would likely not live very long.
How long?
Less than a day.
Less than a day?
Less than a day.
We tried. We tried to make things different. Carla laid there as foot-long needles were jammed into her increasingly taut belly, into our son, into our son’s bladder, to help drain the fluid caught in there thanks to some one-in-a-million abnormality that was neither genetic nor environmental nor anything else known to modern medicine. That meant we had to file it under, “Just one of those things.” No matter how hard we tried, no matter what rays of hope shone briefly through, darkness ultimately descended, and on Dec. 20, 2000, Jacob Alexander Agliata was born and died within a five-hour window.
Twenty-four years later, I miss him. Still.
Though I guess that’s not entirely accurate. It’s hard to miss someone who was in your life so briefly. I don’t have memories to miss. I don’t have any of those markers in life that would make your heart hurt when you thought about them. Jacob got to do very, very little in his time Here. We held him. We loved him. Then he died.
So I guess what I miss more is the young man who existed on Aug. 29, 2000, the day before the ultrasound. I miss the innocence, the purity of not knowing something that life-altering could happen, that in one moment I could be looking for a teeny-tiny penis and the next I could be searching for breath after hearing that my child wasn’t going to live much past birth.
I find it impossible to imagine who that young man might be today had he not heard those words, had he not walked those four months of hell before his son was born and died, had he not had to pick up the shattered remnants of all that once was and put it back together into something approximating a life. All I know is that young man would turn into something far different from who I have actually become.
The very real truth is that the experience I had with Jacob broke me. I tried hard to not let that be so. I clung to my faith and found meaning in the good my son brought to others who heard about him and the walk his mom and dad took to bring him safely into this world. None of that is less true today than it was then. My faith is different today than it was in the wake of Jacob’s death, but I believe just as strongly in a creator God of the universe. But that faith wasn’t and couldn’t be enough for me to not be fundamentally different as a Dad Whose Child Died than if that had never happened.
From my own experience with Jacob, I learned the world is full of broken people given no other choice but to go on. There have been others who have lauded our bravery, our strength, our resilience. It wasn’t bravery. It wasn’t strength. It wasn’t resilience. Those words should be reserved for heroes, and we weren’t heroes. We were two young parents whose child died and who weren’t given any other choice but to go on.
The sun rose. We were still breathing. So we continued.
The world is full of such people … people who took suicide off the table and who, thus, were left no other choice but than to continue.
I have tried to make the best of the time that has come after Jacob. I have helped create two more amazing boys who didn’t have that one-in-a-million tiny flap that blocked their bladders from emptying while they were developing. Those two boys have given me overwhelming joy as I have watched them grow. I don’t know who Jacob would have grown up to be, but I know both my boys who lived are doing a damn fine job of finding their way in the world, and I think I have at least a small part in that.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not broken.
I feel that brokenness on days like today, when the calendar nears Dec. 20 and the rest of those around me are settling into holiday bliss or misguided stress or something other than heart-wrenching grief. I try. I really do. I try not to let an arbitrary spot in time — a box on the calendar — color the holiday season. I try not to be a downer. I try to experience holiday joy as I did before 2000. Sometimes, I have a degree of success.
More often, I do not.
To be fair, all of this comes with a great understanding that there are others who have it worse. I know that. I hear that. I feel that. One thing I learned in the wake of Jacob’s brief life is to not compare griefs. Whether you lost a baby, a teenager, a dog, a hamster, a job, a spouse to an affair, whether your home was destroyed in a fire or a flood or a tornado, whether your girlfriend dumped you on Christmas, whatever it might be … your grief is exactly that — your grief — and it should never be compared to anyone else’s. Mine is mine. Yours is yours. They aren’t even apples and oranges. They are apples and remote controls, oranges and a boulder. Don’t try to put them on opposite ends of a scale and figure out whose is “worse.”
I say all that because I know the holidays aren’t sunshine and rainbows for many, many people. I am just one of them. Like I said, from my own experience with Jacob, I have learned the world is full of broken people given no other choice but to go on. So we go on.
There is no real point to any of these words. There is no “moral of the story.” If you find a lesson or encouragement or a way to talk to a grieving person through these words, cool, but that’s not the point. I’m not really sure what the point is.
What I am sure of is that, when the calendar nears Dec. 20 every year, I feel compelled to write. Early on, I tried to ignore than urge. It never ended well. So I’m writing.
I think part of me hopes that if I just let the words come out of my fingers through the keys on the keyboard, maybe I’ll figure it out someday. Maybe I’ll figure out how to go on better. I’ve been writing about Jacob for more than two decades now, and I still haven’t figured that out, so maybe it’s time to give up on that hope.
What I know is this: This sucks. This hurts. And it’s made 100% worse by the fundamental truth that I have very few people in my life who care enough to listen and be involved in my life on the day-to-day like a friend would. And the saddest part of that is that loneliness is largely because of my brokenness in the wake of Jacob.
Like I said, his death changed me, and it wasn’t for the better. When you realize your son can leave you in the snap of your fingers, you maybe don’t let people in like you otherwise would, you have certain struggles that lead you to push people away or be tough to be friends with, and then one day you wake up and you are 50 and you are awfully, painfully, incredibly alone.
I remember a few years back when I wasn’t alone, when a friend knew what a challenging time this was and sat with me outside on a cold December evening. When I said, “This hurts,” my friend said two simple words that meant so much: “I know.” That person isn’t in my life anymore, but those two words remain. I guess there’s part of me that hopes there are people out there who do know and who are there. If that’s true, would you maybe want to meet for a coffee or something? I could sure use a real-life friend right about now.
Twenty-six is too young to have to pick out a gravesite for your child. It’s too young to have to come up with words for a headstone or plan a funeral. It is too young to have held your fully alive son who miraculously made it into the world and then have to hand him over to a nurse after his tiny heart stops beating. It is too young to know that, in the hours following your infant son’s death, his body will get cold but still spasm as if taking in a breath … giving you the foolish hope that he’s somehow managed to come back and live. It is too young for any of this. But for whatever reason, that’s what happened.
And now I’m 50. I’m still Here. I’ve tried my best to pick up those pieces from 2000 and make a good life. In some ways, I have succeeded. In others, I have failed miserably and, worse, I have hurt people I cared about in the process. The shittiest things in life have a way of spilling over to the completely innocent, I have learned.
Jacob would have turned 24 in a few days, but to say that seems foolish. No one is guaranteed tomorrow, let alone more than two decades of tomorrows, so to automatically grant him a full 24 years seems presumptuous. Yes, Dec. 20 is his birthday, and we will mark the occasion as we have every year since his brief life, by releasing balloons in his memory after saying a few words of remembrance.
And then, life will continue.
It always does.
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