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I know when Alexander and Robert were made: one evening when we were not too tired, when it was still light, although it was already ten o’clock at night, but English summer days are long, and darkness does not come until late. When I say that I know when my twins were made, I do not mean to say that I knew at the time. In fact, making a baby, let alone two, could not have been further from my mind. But when I realized that I was pregnant, I immediately knew when it had happened.
Discovering that I was pregnant was a great shock to me. I was not planning on having any more children. My seven-year-old daughter, Florentina, and my five-year-old son, Andrew, were all the children that my husband, Hugh, and I wanted at the time. In fact, I was taking the pill. Where had this pregnancy come from? How can I reconcile, now, the great shock and sense of desperation that I felt then with the great love and pride that exploded from me the moment I set my still unfocused eyes on my two beautiful, perfect, healthy twin boys? How can I describe how blessed and privileged I felt, and how ashamed of myself for having been upset at finding myself pregnant? I don’t think that I can. Worlds are so imperfect, and feelings, I think, come from worlds forgotten, where words are superfluous.
Immediately after discovering my pregnancy, I went to Italy to spend the summer holiday with my family, and it wasn’t until I returned to England and was eighteen weeks pregnant that I had my first scan. Hugh dropped me off at the hospital’s entrance to spare me the long walk from the car park with an overfull bladder. I waddled like a duck to the scanning facility and was shown right in. I lay on the trolley, and while the technician smeared my tummy with a jelly, I looked longingly in the direction of the loo. I was startled when she interrupted my fantasizing about going to the bathroom by asking me if there were any twins in my family.
I laughed, “No, there are no twins in my family. Do you know, you are the second person to ask me that? The obstetrician asked me the same question last week.”
Her face was serious, and suddenly I realized that this was no joke. With mounting panic, I turned my gaze to the monitor and saw the shapes of two babies! Two very small babies, more like a series of blips on the screen, but two babies nevertheless. By the time Hugh joined me, my life had been turned upside down and I was in a flood of tears. Hugh looked at the monitor with awe and held my hand tightly.
From then on, I had a scan once a month. I grew bigger and more uncomfortable with each passing day. We had wanted to know the gender of our babies and chose the names Robert and Alexander for our sons. We affectionately nicknamed them “thing one and thing two”, after the characters in the Dr. Seuss story, “The Cat in the Hat.” But emotionally, it wasn’t until the week before Alexander and Robert were born that I really accepted them.
The babies were to be delivered by Cæsarean section, and I went into hospital the night before. It was one of the longest nights of my life. I don’t think that I slept more than a couple of hours, for I spent most of it pacing up and down the hospital corridor, too excited to rest. What would they look like? How much would they weigh? Finally, the darkness of night gave way to the tremulous light of dawn and I smiled to myself, thinking, “It will not be long now, I am going to see them soon.” I felt rather like a child awakening on Christmas morning, knowing that something wonderful was waiting to be opened.
Soon, Hugh arrived with Anne, his sister, and shortly after that I was taken to the operating theater. Hugh was made to wear surgical greens, and I must say he looked like a dashing surgeon. I was made to wear elasticized stockings, to prevent embolism, a white gown, and a surgical cap. We all laughed with excitement, and one of the midwives offered to take a photograph of Hugh and me. I was given a general anesthetic, and Hugh was only allowed to stay with me until I was asleep. The next thing I knew, the vague form of my husband stood before me, holding the most beautiful baby in his arms. It was one of our sons.
“Touch him, darling, it’s Robert.” I stretched my arm out to touch our baby, and again I felt like the child on Christmas morning, only this time I had opened my beautiful presents. “Where is Alexander?” I managed to whisper.
“He is here,” replied one of the midwives, I looked at Alexander and smiled at the thought that Christmas had come twice in the same day, and as I drifted back into a fluffy cloud of sleep, I knew that Alexander and Robert were safe. I knew that they were ours, and I knew that we loved them.
Over the next eight days in the hospital, I delighted in getting to know my new little sons. It amused me to see how flustered the other mothers in the ward were with just one baby, while I, despite the obvious pain and discomfort that follows a multiple pregnancy and surgical delivery, was very relaxed and confident. My babies were very easy to look after. By the time we left the hospital to go home, we had bonded: I knew them well and I could tell their cries apart. I knew their little burps: actually quite loud burps sometimes. I loved them equally, and I was endlessly fascinated by them.
Naturally, life with a newborn baby or two is not endless bliss. Lack of sleep is a serious problem. Luckily, we had a maternity nurse to help us look after the babies for the first thirteen weeks: I was anxious that I should be able to spend time with Florentina and Andrew, who, though much older than the babies, were children nevertheless and needed their mother, too. Besides, eleven weeks from the day the babies were born, we were flying to New York, as Hugh’s work demanded that we relocate to the States.
Mercifully, by the time we moved to New York, Alexander and Robert had started to sleep through the night.
I took us all a while to adjust to everything new and life was very busy, but the babies were a constant source of wonder and joy, of blessing and privileges. If only it were possible to adequately describe the richness that they brought to our lives, and the immense love that we all shared. As always, though, words are imperfect.
Alexander and Robert weighed six pounds each when they were born. By the time they were fifteen weeks old, they weighed fourteen and fifteen pounds. They were thriving, and the pediatrician pronounced them “Just splendidly perfect.”
On the morning of September 17, 1995, I awoke later than usual: at 6:50 a.m., according to my watch. For a few seconds, I lay in bed, luxuriating in the feeling of well being that follows a restful sleep, and I looked forward to a relaxing Sunday. Hugh had heard our seven-and-a-half-month-old babies before I had and was already warming their bottles for their early morning feed. I swung my legs off the bed and went straight to the nursery.
Much to my surprise, Robert was the only one crying. I went to his cot and picked him up. He stopped crying as soon as I held him in my arms. Alexander was still asleep, and I remember thinking, “How strange,” because ordinarily he was the first one to awake. I walked around to Alexander’s cot to look at him. In the dim, early morning light of the nursery, I saw that he was completely covered by the blanket; only his little legs were visible. His legs were at the end of the crib where his head should have been: somehow, he’d got turned around. A wave of panic overtook me, and I grabbed the blanket and pulled it from him. I bent down to touch his face. “Phew, what a relief!” He was warm, and his forehead was a bit damp.
As Hugh came in with the milk bottles, I took the one for Robert and said, “Do you know, Alexander just gave me a fright, he was completely covered by the blanket.”
No sooner had I finished that sentence than Hugh, who had by then picked Alexander up, stunned me by saying: “He is still warm.”
What an odd thing to say, I thought. I know that he is warm: I have just touched him. Suddenly scared again, I asked Hugh if something was wrong.
“I am not sure,” he replied, and I ran to turn the light on. I ran back to Hugh and the baby, and I screamed the scream of ages. Alexander’s face was the most awful color: a nasty, blotchy yellow. Hugh told me not to shout, but I shouted back that I was going to call an ambulance.
Holding Robert, I ran as fast as I could to the telephone in our bedroom. Without ceremony, I plopped Robert down on my bed and put the bottle in his mouth with one hand, while with the other hand I dialed 911. After what seemed like ages, someone answered. I explained that I needed an ambulance for my baby.
“What is wrong with the baby?” the dispatcher asked.
“I think that he needs oxygen; I found him with his face covered by the blanket.”
“We’ll be there,” came the reply.
Robert was quietly drinking his milk and looking at me. Oh, darling Robert! You knew already, didn’t you? From the beginning, you two were as one.
I realized that we needed someone to stay with our other children while we went to the hospital with Alexander. I was breathing in great gulps, my heart was beating so fast that I thought that it would explode; yet my hands were steady. I dialed my next-door neighbors’ number, only to be greeted by their answering machine. “Please, Janet, wake up!” I shouted into the phone.
I then called Malcolm and Susie, our first American friends. Mercifully, Susie answered and promised to come right over.
Carrying Robert in my arms, I ran downstairs. I threw open both the back and the front doors and ran outside into the pouring rain. “Oh God, where is the ambulance?” I screamed. Worried that I was frightening Robert, I ran back inside and dropped him on the play mat.
I darted back out into the pouring rain and ran backwards and forwards in our drive. I didn’t know what else to do. I was howling like a wounded animal. “Please, somebody help, for God’s sake, somebody help, where IS the ambulance?”
Completely shattered, I finally sat on the steps of the front porch and cradled my head in my hands. Suddenly, a man jumped out of a car that I had not heard approach. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I thought that he was somebody who must have heard me cry, as he didn’t look like a paramedic. Weeks later, I learned that his name was Stewart and that he was the Captain of the Irvington Volunteer Ambulance Corp.
“Where is the baby?” he asked, and all I could say was, “Please help.” Later, he told me that he had to shake me to get me to tell him where the baby was.
At last, I ran into the house shouting: “The baby is upstairs, quick, help.” When we got to the nursery I gave Stewart a big shove, and he nearly lost his balance.
I was dimly aware that there were a lot of other people in uniforms. I later realized that they were police officers.
I did not go into the babies’ room. I could see Hugh bent over the changing table where he had put Alexander, but I just ran away again. I did not know which way to go, I would take a few steps one way and then turn around again. I made for the telephone and then changed my mind. I went to the front door just as Stewart was running out, my baby held high in his arms, shouting: “Let’s go, we are not waiting for the ambulance!” He jumped into a police car, his mouth covering Alexander’s. I flattened myself against a wall, and before I could even think, they were gone!
I needed to talk to someone in my family, and I called my sister and brother-in-law in Australia.
When Renee answered the phone, I sobbed that something was wrong with Alexander and that he had just been taken to hospital.
“And didn’t you go with him?” she asked in disbelief.
“I couldn’t,” I replied, but I already felt that I had done something wrong and that I was being judged.
“Please Renee, pray, please get everybody to pray.”
“I am so very sorry.” The sorrow in Renee’s voice was undiminished by the distance.
Hugh and I dressed hurriedly and as soon as Malcolm and Susie arrived, we jumped into our car, and Hugh drove off before I even had time to close the door. It was still raining, the traffic lights were red, and it seemed to me that everything was conspiring against us and our baby.
“Please, God, help us,” I kept repeating, and it struck me very forcibly that I had never got around to doing a first aid course. I had been meaning to, for a long time, but something had always come up and I had never taken it.
Hugh tried to prepare me that Alexander might not make it, but I disregarded what he said. Our baby was in safe hands now, and all he needed was a bit of oxygen. He wasn’t ill; he had no defects, no medical conditions. He had smiled at me when I had put him down to sleep the previous night.
When we arrived at Dobbs Ferry Community Hospital, I jumped out of the car before it had even stopped and made for the Emergency Room. The first person I saw there was Stewart, who had come to our house and taken Alexander away.
“Is he going to be alright?” I asked, full of hope.
“He is with the doctors,” came the grave reply. I felt that he was not telling me what he knew.
A man appeared from nowhere and asked me what had happened. I told him, as I was to do many times after that, that I had found Alexander in his cot, his feet where his head should have been, and a blanket covering most of his body.
“Was he lying on his tummy?” the man wanted to know.
“No, he wasn’t, he was lying on his back,” I quickly replied, lest there be any doubt that I knew what was best for my babies. The man, whoever he was, went away, and I don’t remember seeing him again. I looked at Stewart and burst into hysterical sobs. He held me in his arms, and I heard Hugh behind me apologize: “I am sorry, my wife is very emotional.”
I needed air. I headed for the glass door, but it wouldn’t open. I banged it with my fists, kicked it with my feet, and still it wouldn’t open. Stewart pushed a button, and the door opened.
I sat on a bench outside the Emergency Room, oblivious to the other person sitting there, crying as if my heart would break and hoping that God would hear my cries.
“Please God, have mercy, whatever I have done wrong, please have mercy. I’ll do whatever you want but please, Father, don’t take away my son.”
After a few moments, I went back inside. Hugh was talking with a ginger-haired nurse. I ran to her and asked how our baby was.
“He is on a ventilator and he is being given medications.”
“Will he be brain-damaged?” I pictured my darling, bright, buzzing little son. My greatest fear at the time was that Alexander might be brain-damaged. My darling little mosquito, my husband’s “Xander rander rander”, our delightful baby with his grinning eyes teasing us, pretending to cough, and laughing in delight when we coughed back at him. What would it be like to have him returned to us brain-damaged?
“We don’t know yet.”
“How is he?” we both asked.
“He is on a ventilator,” she repeated, “and as soon as he is stable we will transfer him to the Westchester Medical Center.”
“What is the best and the worst scenario? Please tell us.”
“The best scenario is that he starts to breathe by himself and then we will transfer him.”
“You mean that he is not breathing?” It had never occurred to me that he wasn’t breathing and, although the word ventilator had been used once before, to me it hadn’t meant that Alexander was not breathing.
“No, the ventilator is breathing for him.”
Hugh and I realized that if Alexander were transferred, we would want to go with him, and we might be gone for some time. Susie had to be told when and how much Robert needed to be fed and where everything was. We decided that Hugh should quickly go home to see Susie.
He had barely left when a nurse came to tell me that the doctor was coming out to speak to us. I thought that it was time to transfer Alexander, and I fretted that Hugh would not be back in time.
“Mrs. Williamson-Noble?” the doctor asked, after introducing himself as Doctor Stillman.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“We are going to try for another two or three minutes, and then we will have to give up.”
I looked at him uncomprehendingly. What on earth was he talking about? As he started to walk away, rebellion and anger welled up inside me. I felt an explosion in my head, and I started to shout: “NO NO NO NO, you can’t give up.” The doctor stopped in his tracks and started to come towards me again.
“Go to my baby!” I screamed, and he left. Would he have given up if it had been his baby?
I prayed, oh, how hard I prayed for my son’s life, for our lives. Parents die before their children, not the other way around. I could not put together any of the pictures going through my mind. They were about to give up on my son. MY SON! Where had all this come from? What had I done? I didn’t know, but it must have been something very bad because my son was apparently dying. DYING?
Dr. Stillman came back looking devastated, and utterly drained. I jumped up and started to shout, but he held me tight in his arms and said that Alexander had died of SIDS. I had never heard that word before. He told me that it meant Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and I realized that what it meant was that Alexander had died of Cot Death. My little son had died of Cot Death.
Dr. Stillman asked me if I wanted to see Alexander, but I didn’t think that I could see my baby dead. It was too frightening. It would be like accepting what had happened. But, had it happened? I was not sure. That was what they were telling me, but who were they to know? They hadn’t put my babies to bed the night before. They had not spent the last seven and a half months looking after Alexander and Robert. They hadn’t laughed with my babies, fed them, burped them, played with them, nursed them to sleep. How could they say now that one of them was dead?
The whole thing was sick. I would know if Alexander was dead. Wasn’t I his mother?
Their mother? I had carried them for many, many weeks in my tummy, until I could hardly walk. I had kept them safe. They were perfect. Everybody said so - the doctor at the hospital where they were born, the pediatrician in England, their new pediatrician in the States. And now a doctor and some nurses who had never seen them before, who knew nothing about any of us, pretended to know that one of them was dead. Absolutely NOT! I would not allow it!
And what about Robert? He certainly could not do without his twin brother. They were part of each other; I had pictures of them sucking one another’s thumb in my womb. I had given birth to two babies, and I needed two babies. I did not have one to spare. And that was that. Now the best thing to do would be to take him home and put an end to this farce. In fact, we should not have come in the first place; it had all been a big mistake.
Dr. Stillman then explained that Alexander had been dead when he had arrived at the hospital. The blanket had kept him warm. He had died an hour, perhaps even two hours before he had been brought into the hospital.
Hugh returned. We looked at each other with very different eyes from those with which we had looked at each other when the babies were born. We clung to each other and sobbed.
Hugh and I were ushered into the room where they had tried to save Alexander. I was very surprised that Death had been fought but, alas, not defeated, only a few yards from where I had been waiting.
Had a dagger been plunged through my body, the pain would not have been more searing that what I felt when I saw our little mosquito lying on the gurney. His darling eyes were slightly open, and I could see their color. I rushed over to him and tried to take him in my arms, my body protectively shielding his. A nurse cautioned me about dislodging the tubes in his little body, and so I moved over to the other side of the gurney and settled myself near his face, one hand cupped over his exquisitely shaped head and the other over his left cheek. That felt good. I could close my eyes and sleep with him, feel his warmth and softness, my body recognizing him. A thought occurred to me then. Alexander, my little mosquito, was an angel, a beautiful little angel, who would always be with us. For the briefest of moments it seemed so simple, so easy to understand. I asked for two chairs, one for Hugh and one for myself. It would be so nice to sit together, on either side of our son, and rest with him, enjoy his closeness together.
The chairs arrived at the same time as Father Byrn, the priest we had asked for. He looked upset. “Has this baby been baptized?” was the first thing he asked.
“Yes, Father, they were baptized when they were four weeks old, in London.” There, at least, was something over which I could not be reproached.
“Father, we are very upset this morning,” intoned Father Byrn.
Suddenly very angry again, I shouted: “And bloody pissed off, you can tell Him.”
The priest continued, “And, indeed, very angry and confused. We do not understand why we have been asked to carry this cross.”
I put my head on Alexander’s shoulder and let the priest’s voice and prayers lull me into a temporary quiet.
“What do we do now?” I wailed suddenly.
“For a baby, we have a Mass of the Angels, not a funeral,” replied Father Byrn, who had misunderstood my question. I was asking how we were going to go on. Then he said that we had our other children to look after, and that we must go home to them.
“Go home? And leave him here? I have to look after him, don’t you see, he needs me.”
The priest responded: “He is not here anymore, only his body is here. He doesn’t need you any more: he is with God. But your other children need you. You must go home and look after them.”
“And what are we going to say to them?”
“Tell them that Alexander has gone to Heaven and that he is an angel. Get rid of your guilt right now. Alexander is not dead because of anything that you or anybody else has done.”
So he is an angel, I was right. I should be happy for him.
After Father Byrn excused himself, we stayed with our little mosquito for a while longer. Close to him, enjoying the last of his warmth, the last of his softness, we felt at peace. But Father Byrn had given me a sense of urgency about getting back to our other children, and soon I decided it was time for us to go. I regret that now. I wish that we had stayed much longer with our little son. I wish we had taken pictures of him. I wish we had cut a lock of his hair to keep and to touch from time to time. I wish I had known that this would be the last time we would see Alexander as we had known him. I kissed him and kissed him, until my need for physical closeness to him was temporarily assuaged. I didn’t realize at the time that it would not be long before I would want to kiss him again, see him again, feel his skin next to mine. I didn’t realize that once I walked out of the hospital, there would be no more chances of being together like that again, and that then the real agony would start.
As I stood up, I noticed that Alexander’s shoulders, sweet and round, were uncovered, so I pulled the sheet and tucked it around him. I worried that he might get cold. He had been stripped of the clothes in which I had dressed him the night before. For a moment I forgot that he was dead, but he was and nothing would keep him warm now. As I walked away from the gurney, I worried that he might roll over and fall. The trolley was high, he would certainly hurt himself. With a start I realized again that he was dead. He could not fall off.
I walked out of the room and left Alexander there. Dr. Stillman was waiting outside.
“I would like to take him home now, please,” I said.
“I’m afraid you can’t.”
“Why not? I am his mother, you know, he needs me. I have never left him with strangers.”
“Mrs. Williamson-Noble, he needs to have an autopsy. Do you give your permission?”
“An autopsy?” The thought of it was ghastly. What would they do to my son? Cut him all up? How much more of this did they think I could take?
The black nurse seemed to read my mind. “He will look the same. You will not be able to see anything from the outside.”
“Would the autopsy help with research?”
“Yes, it would,” replied Dr. Stillman.
I looked at Hugh, and he nodded his consent.
“Alright, then. I want to know why my son died.” Suddenly the doctor’s face went out of focus. I could not hear his words. I found myself on the floor. I hadn’t fainted: I had just crumpled onto the floor. I wish I had fainted. I wish I had lost consciousness forever. Part of me had died with my darling son and I wanted to be where he was, at least to make sure that he would not get lost, to make sure that he was fed. Part of me knew that I had my other children to look after, but how could I look after them when there was nothing left in me? I was cold inside and utterly drained. My body felt heavy, my legs like stones.
We arrived home, got out of the car, and went into the house that had betrayed us. I immediately went to find Robert, scooped him up and held him close. I loved Robert as much as I loved Alexander and Florentina and Andrew. But he was Robert; holding him did not alleviate my pain, nor did it lessen the loss.
Florentina came into the room. She looked at me, then at the baby in my arms, then at Hugh, and then around the room. Frowning, she looked at me again.
“Where is Alexander?”
I hesitated for a moment. I tried not to cry. “Darling, Alexander has gone to Heaven: he is an angel now.”
Puzzlement, then horror and very quickly grief displayed themselves on Florentina’s face. “No!” she cried, before bursting into heart-wrenching sobs. She ran from the drawing room into the kitchen. Among the pictures on the door of the fridge was one of Alexander. Florentina took it and held it to her heart, sobbing. “It is all my fault, I pushed his tummy in.”
“No, Darling, it is not your fault, it is nobody’s fault.”
“Why did he die, then?”
“I don’t know, but he is an angel now. He will always be with us, he will always look after us, it is just that for the time being we can’t see him.”
Andrew, who had joined us but hadn’t said anything, left the room. Hugh went to find him. He was upstairs, looking in all the rooms, in all the cupboards. He hoped that maybe Alexander was somewhere upstairs and we didn’t know it. At length, he came back downstairs, sat on one of the sofas, and startled us with a question: “Who murdered my brother?”
Immediately, I knew what he meant, and while I knew that nobody had murdered Alexander, I also knew that something had.
Florentina was still sobbing. Andrew was quiet. “Why didn’t you take me with you? I hadn’t even said goodbye, I want to say goodbye to him.”
“Me too,” said Andrew.
Although my first instinct was to take Florentina, Andrew and Robert to the hospital so they could see their brother, I was advised against doing so. The next time any of us saw Alexander was three days after he had died, at the funeral parlor. Laid out in a casket, looking like a doll, he was not at all the delicious baby we knew.
Alexander’s death and burial were a living laceration of my body. I resolved, then, that since Cot Death had brutally wrenched our son from us without as much as a by-your-leave, I would go after Cot Death for the rest of my life. Cot Death was on notice. I would go after it, day, after day, after day until it was stamped off the face of the Earth.
But for now, my darling little son, rest in peace, and if Heaven is a child’s Disneyland, do go on the rides. But take care until Mummy is allowed to look after you again.
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